Here are the details – you can follow Susan Toy of Alberta Books Canada on Twitter, but she’s hosting, so check out the hashtag instead. And if you’re in Calgary, get yourself on the mailing for the next one – Susan’s going to see if she can’t make the next salon in December (surprise December guest is an Alberta author who won the Bantam/Seal First Novel award who teaches in the MFA creative writing program at University of Calgary – my that’s a broad hint).

Alberta Books Canada is pleased to announce
a new reading series
The Johnson House Literary Salons
in Marda Loop, Calgary
Please join us for the first of these events
Tuesday, November 29th
7 – 9 p.m.
Featuring readings by Calgary authors
Betty Jane Hegerat
Lori Hahnel
Rosemary Griebel
Bob Stallworthy
Followed by a discussion with the authors
Books published by these authors will be available to purchase
thanks to Sue Hill of Monkeyshines Children’s Books
Admission fee – $10 per person
(In keeping with our belief that authors should be compensated for their participation,
ALL monies collected will be paid directly to the authors)
Coffee and tea will be served – please bring your own cup
If you are interested in attending please send an email to susanmtoy@gmail.com with the subject line: Johnson House Salon
You will receive confirmation and the exact address in a return email. Only a limited number of tickets will be available, so please send your request soon.
We look forward to welcoming you to our first Johnson House Salon!

Oddly, a Twitter account for the program was created – and as of today, has tweeted exactly once, on August 18. The general Banff Centre Twitter account has provided some information, but has failed to recognize the #banffscience hashtag.

I don’t want to be all judge-y and prescriptive here. But people have been live tweeting conferences and events for years now, and this is the second major failure to take advantage of an opportunity for some almost-free public relations I’ve seen this week.

The Banff Centre programs aren’t cheap (in excess of C$5k)  and there aren’t a lot of scholarships available for them. Everyone I know who’s attended any kind of course or workshop put on by the Banff Centre has raved about the experience, and the instructors in this program are top notch. The programs have grown, morphed, and expanded over the course of the last twenty years, getting bigger and better and more varied. In this particular program, the enthusiasm of both the participants and the instructors is palpable (see this tweet from John Rennie, one of the instructors, and this post from one of the scholarship winner attendees).

So far I haven’t seen any mainstream media coverage of this particular program. Instead, there was a Globe and Mail article this week about the Banff Centre, in which the claim that it makes Alberta Canada’s new arts hub is made. There’s no mention of the Science Communications program at all.

So here are some suggestions (and a prescription or two):

• If you’re marketing something (and the Banff Centre most definitely is marketing its programs, courses and workshops), make a commitment to do so and follow through on it.
• If you’ve established a social media presence, don’t neglect it. Use the power of crowd sourcing in particular and social media in general to tap into prospective volunteers. Inviting bloggers and live tweeters to attend and participate and comping them in to events is probably the cheapest marketing and public relations in which you’ll ever invest.
• Seize the day by getting out in front of the hashtag. #banffscience is a great hashtag. It’s a shame the Banff Centre doesn’t seem to have to twigged to the fact that it’s being used. But if a co-ordinated social media strategy was in place, the Centre itself would have created – and used – the hashtag.

Good corporate public relations drives employee retention and attraction. It also drives program participation. Wouldn’t it be nice if some of the Science Communications participants returned to the Banff Centre to take the adventure photography course? Or if some of the folks from the creative non-fiction course took the science communications course? Unique programming only goes so far. Right now, according to the Banff Centre’s stats, 75% of program participants are Canadian. But given the strength of the Canadian dollar and the meltdown in the US economy, plus the fact that many of the program’s instructors are Americans, wouldn’t it be nice to ensure there isn’t a 25% drop off in attendance?

I don’t mean to single out the Banff Centre or its Science Communications course. An international literary festival this week also demonstrated that it doesn’t quite get the value or scope of social media either – despite a Twitter feed and two mainstream journalists in attendance, with only three events running simultaneously they were unable to provide coverage of all three events on Twitter. That’s a shame, as well as a huge opportunity missed. It’s really not all that different from the case study/customer success story tactic, in which the client pays to have a case study developed and the client’s customer reaps the benefits of participating in the case study by getting public relations it hasn’t paid for.

Live tweeting and live blogging events may not drive attendance for your current programming. But it has the potential to drive future attendance in 2012, 2013,  2014, and beyond, at a time when your local, homegrown audience may well be vanishing. Don’t discount the ‘been there, done that’ factor or the fact that the ‘staycation’ may not be here to stay. You may well find volunteers among your existing staff who are willing to live blog or live tweet events. You’re paying them anyway. Their enthusiasm for promoting, organizing, and administering the events you put on will only increase if you allow them to participate by turning them into brand ambassadors and allowing them to showcase some of the skills you may not currently be paying them to use. It could be the cheapest professional development you ever offer them. And if you cast your net more widely for volunteer live tweeters, you’ll be amazed at the coverage you get and the goodwill you create. People will be banging down your doors for the opportunity to participate, not just spectate. Increasingly bloggers are transitioning to paid online and mainstream news organizations. You could be making a media friend for life. Why wouldn’t you want to do that?

After a great meeting with Susan Toy of Alberta Books Canada this weekend, which built on a conversation I’d had with an indie publisher a few weeks ago, I thought I’d do a quick post on what I’m calling ‘bevolution.’ Bevolution is short for ‘book evolution.’

Susan said to me, there are actually five (or six) sales involved in getting a book from author to consumer. Here they are – followed by an additional four steps involved in the consumer purchase decision when the customer is actually in the store with the book in front of them:

1. Author must sell manuscript to agent or acquisitions editor at publishing company (this is two steps if you have or are seeking an agent – you have to sell your book to an agent, who will then sell it to an acquisitions editor at a publishing company).
2. Acquisitions editor must sell book to marketing department.
3. Marketing department must sell book to sales department.
4. Sales department must sell book to retailers and etailers.
5. Retailers and etailers must sell book to consumers.

Once the book is in the store or on the book etailing site, Kate Sullivan of Candlemark & Gleam outlined four more steps in the decision-to-buy process:

6. Front cover.
7. Back cover (including marketing synopsis and blurbs from other authors/reviews).
8. First sentence/paragraph.
9. Random sentence/paragraph from the approximate middle of the book.

That’s a lot of bases to cover. It took almost four billion years for human beings to evolve in anything like their current form. Does that put your career trajectory from unknown scribbler to ‘best-selling author who’s a household word’ into perspective a bit?

Here’s the interview.

Andrew’s right – Twitter in particular and social media in general are such overwhelming and customizable experiences that it’s really bewildering when you first try to get involved and leverage it for business goals. One of the things I really enjoy about working with authors, (aside from the fact that you can count on them to do some of the writing for you – because let’s face it, public relations is about writing compelling copy in exactly the right way – and then tweaking it and repurposing it and coming up with yet another catchy angle that will help you reach another segment of your target audience) – where was I? Oh yes – while authors (not the ones I work with!) may sometimes be a bit off in the EQ department, they’re rarely slouches when it comes to IQ.

This means that if they’ll listen, they learn. Before you know it, they’re teaching you things. I’ve learned a lot about how to behave on Twitter from Stuart Clark, and I used him as a shining example when I was working with Andrew on his initial Twitter training, namely:

• Thank people for retweets (RTs) and for follow Friday (#ff) recommendations.
• Always check your @messages. Engage with the people who are seeking to engage with you. Always be gracious. Don’t get involved in gossipy and churlish pissing matches.
• Let people on Twitter get a little glimpse of who you are as a person, not just an author flogging a book – let your passions show a little bit.

So I’m delighted to pass on a couple of great posts that Andrew found and tweeted re authors and social media.

The first is Holly Robinson’s Huffington Post article on a writer’s first year with social media.

The second is Penny Sansivieri’s Twitter primer (also a HuffPo post).

As for Stuart? Well – as he’s about to make the transition from non-fiction to fiction author with the first of his three novels about astronomy and science giants, he too is reading and sharing more information about not just astronomy and cosmology, but is also beginning to engage with fiction readers, by sharing this review of Juli Zeh’s novel about two competitive physicists, Dark Matter.

The best thing about working with writers? Establishing goals that support marketing objectives is a dawdle. It’s not about building brand awareness or shifting public opinion. It’s about selling books. And by selling I mean sharing. Because readers are passionate people with an insatiable desire for their next fix. And it had better be quality stuff. Writers are the folks who supply that demand, either through content creation or content sharing. I’m so glad they exist. I’m even more glad I get to work with some of them.

That static Web 1.0 web site you spent so much money on two or three years ago is sneered at and in order to maintain your search engine rankings you feel under increasing pressure to add a blog and feed it with content. Then you have to master Twitter to promote your blog and no one will read your media release unless it’s a social media release which means you’ve got to start shooting amateur video you can post on YouTube and you haven’t mastered Facebook and now you’re being told you need to create a Facebook group page and instead of ever being done with this whole business of communicating so you can get on with growing and running your business, you end up feeling like you’re even farther behind than when you started.

Inspired by a recent post from the brilliant folks at Juice, I’m going to suggest that you still need to learn to walk before you can run. Or, as the folks at Juice say:

There has been a wave of mania about social media and, in particular, Twitter. These have a place in an overall digital public relations plan. But let’s all get our basic building blocks in order first, the usability and optimisation of our websites, the effectiveness of our email marketing campaigns and a blog integrated into our website and using a relevant set of keywords.

Public relations is a process, and this is, perhaps, the single most misunderstood aspect of the profession. The big launch event that generates coverage and begins the buzz is a beginning. It’s not the goal and it’s not the endpoint. No matter how brilliant you are or how revolutionary your product, establishing yourself as an industry expert or your product or service as the market leader is not something that happens overnight. Even the ‘instant sensations’ like Susan Boyle have 1. spent years – often decades – studying their craft and 2. aren’t necessarily the most sustainable – or optimal – strategies. If you’re satisfied with 15 minutes of fame, fine. If you want to be a household word for a decade or more, you might want to pace yourself a bit.

Instead of dreaming of instant riches as a result of ‘going viral’ on the internet – which is probably about as likely as learning to read today and delving immediately into the works of Roland Barthes the next – organizations need to invest in branding, marketing, and public relations strategies that move at a pace with which they’re comfortable and which are achievable. For new businesses in particular, the challenges of the start-up phase are daunting – and that includes finding the right people to hire as your business grows and ensuring you don’t end up in a cash flow crunch that means you’ve become a victim of your own success.

How will this drive a public relations renaissance? Sooner or later, when social media-only efforts fail to produce the desired results because they’re not part of a larger strategy that includes all stakeholders – including those who don’t want to participate in social media, those who want and need more than a 140-character Tweet, those who prefer the ‘personal touch’ (even if it’s only excellent customer service via telephone) – organizations are going to have to go back to square one, create content that’s effective, and develop communications strategies that do what communications strategies were always meant to do: reach everyone who needs and wants to be reached in the way they choose to ‘engage.’

This can mean more work rather than less. It can also lead to being overwhelmed by the sheer volume and pace of online communications and the ever-shifting ‘advice’ from the latest self-styled social media guru. Social media-savvy public relations consultants can help you allocate and focus your resources – both your communications spend and your time. Think of us as communications organizers rather than people to whom you’ve outsourced your conversations and it will all seem a little less overwhelming. And remember the first question to be answered in the communications planning process is, “Where are we now?” Also remember that while there have really been no good interviews that ever resulted from a mere recitation of key messages, the more interviews you do the better you’ll get at them. But without putting in the time and effort to learn mainstream and social media culture from folks who study it, you’re a lot more likely to drown from a dive into the deep end than you would be if you paddled in the shallows and learned how to float first with someone hanging onto your bathing suit, ready to pluck you out of the water if you start to drown.

Naturally, as a PR person, I’ve taken advantage of the opportunity to follow as many media outlets as I can. A huge portion of any public relations practitioner’s daily task is to monitor and review media, constantly taking its pulse, identifying trends, and, frankly, analyzing bias. That bias, incidentally, is endemic to the human condition, and can include not only the way in which an event or an announcement is covered locally, regionally, nationally, and globally, but also whether it is covered or not, when and where coverage appears (front page, section front page, above the fold, below the fold, left side, right side – all these factor into whether an article is going to be read or not, and by whom).

PR folk don’t just monitor their clients’ media coverage – they monitor their clients’ industries and socio-economic trends in general. That and the fact that they tend to be smart people with heightened literacy skills is how they can advise you that 2009 is probably not the best time to try to launch your luxury sedan and perhaps step up production of your serviceable, stalwart vehicles.

Conversely, of course, in the depths of a recession/depression, the need for escape from the brutal realities of foreclosures, repossessions and personal bankruptcies means that entertainment trends will often follow a very different course. Think Dynasty, which launched in 1981 and ran till 1989. Think about the fact that shoulder pads have recently made a comeback in women’s fashions, and that the term ‘bling’ was coined at time when property values in North America rose to ridiculous and unsustainably high levels before an inevitable crash. Who wore more bling than Alexis and Crystal Carrington? (I should mention I don’t consider myself any kind of economic expert at all – but when you’ve lived through two or more recessions in your lifetime, you start to figure out that what goes up usually comes down sooner or later.)

In 1981,  at the peak of an inflationary cycle that had lasted throughout the 1970s, some Canadian companies not renowned for either their generosity or their high profit margins were handing out standard annual increases of as much as 12 per cent to retain staff and – well – because they had to, because the price of everything rose and rose and rose. And then that bubble burst, and the 1981-1982 recession in this country was considered the deepest and longest recession of the Canadian economy since the Second World War. 

In precisely the same way traditional advertising media buyers look long and hard at readership demographics, PR practitioners need to focus their efforts to reach their clients’ stakeholders. Reaching those stakeholders through traditional media is still one of the ways to do this, although it’s not now – nor has it ever been – the only way to do so. Social media provides a cost-effective way to potentially reach a lot of those stakeholders as well. Unfortunately, it’s not a particularly time-effective way.

And that, I think, is where the problem arises and the crimes against Twitter begin to be committed by many mainstream media outlets (and some individual journalists) who’ve hopped onto the Twitter bandwagon.

The Nieman Journalism Lab and Kirk LaPointe of the Vancouver Sun are doing a fine job of monitoring the demise of traditional media (print in particular) and of suggesting and evaluating  potential new business models that might help newspapers survive. Not all of them are going to make it though: the last month has seen a 10% shrinkage of North American print publications. CanWest Global is trying to unload two British Columbia television states and has ceased its morning and mid-day news broadcasts. The Christian Science Monitor announced it’s going to cease publishing a print edition before the middle of 2009, and the New York Times is mulling printing papers three to four times a week rather than seven days a week. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is up for sale, and has been for a while.

But in the meantime, every traditional media outlet and its second cousin twice removed has hopped onto Twitter (the latest local entrant is talk radio station CKNW in early February 2009). And what are they doing? With some notable exceptions (and I’ll get to them in a minute), they’re treating Twitter like a broadcast medium. They’ve got their automated tweets all set up and they’re blasting out four to six news items at the same time every day. Whoosh – CBC’s tweets go out. Whoosh – the Georgia Straight sends out a blast. Whoosh – The Guardian does the same thing.  Then BBC News starts up – and BBC SciTech – and then BBC Health. And suddenly you’re scrambling to read 40 articles at once and have so many windows open you can’t count ‘em (or see them). And then they subside for another six to 24 hours and it all starts up again. It’s the virtual equivalent of copious projectile vomiting.

Here’s the odd thing though: most of the journalists on Twitter are writing how-to articles about it – not so much how to get more followers or Twitter etiquette (although some of them presume to do precisely that), but ‘benefits of Twitter’ articles. My question is, how could they possibly know what the benefits are, when most of them have completely and utterly missed the point of social media? Which is that it’s about exchanging information, not about blasting out broadcasting messages. The lethargy that may have been inferred from only one person in 1000 actually writing and mailing a letter to the editor doesn’t mean the other 999 don’t have opinions – and social media has enabled the expression of those opinions to an unprecedented degree. Except – newsflash – when you make it difficult for people to talk to you, they’re going to talk about you. And more often they’ll do so in unflattering terms than in flattering ones. Because if you knew anything about my field, public relations, and two of its specialties, community/stakeholder consultations and issues management,  you’d know how very important it is to empower people by giving them the opportunity to be heard. Often that’s all people really want. They don’t expect their opinions to influence large corporations’ strategies or government policy, but they do want to be validated by being listened to in a way that doesn’t smack of tokenism. As far as broadcast media is concerned: do you have any idea how many people shout at their radio and television stations? And then either turn them off or switch to another station when they hear broadcasters spouting idiocies?

Here’s another controversial thing I’m going to say: marketers who don’t really understand the range of public relations activities can just STFU about public relations people trying to ‘control the message’ and that era being over. Because I’m tired of hearing that nonsense from the very same folks who created lifestyle advertising and who know SFA about the range of public relations activities (email if you don’t know what those acronyms stand for). It wasn’t a PR person who invented the slogans, ‘Coke. It’s the Real Thing’ (what, the real killer combo of caffeine and sugar?) or ‘At Ford, Quality is Job One.’  Those were advertising/marketing folks. In the meantime, it was PR people, listening intently as always, who would have alerted GM to the fact that, um, people in the auto repair industry and in body shops across North America were sniggering that GM stood for ‘got money’ not General Motors as they watched an endless procession of GM cars come in time and time again for expensive repairs and body work.

It’s also not the marketers, the advertisers, or journalists who do crisis communications, and have to deal with the very real trauma of people struggling to do the right thing when disaster strikes, whether it’s a train derailment, a product recall, or an avalanche. If people didn’t need help in time of crisis, we wouldn’t have firefighters, ambulances, police cars equipped with sirens, Search and Rescue volunteers or standing armies, would we? In the feeding frenzy that ensues when media descend in a crisis, it’s the PR people who direct the dissemination of information to everyone who needs to know – and believe me, it’s not usually the general public who need to know first. It’s staff and their families and those trying to find out what’s happened to their loved ones. And they deserve to hear the news in a caring, individualized, and compassionate way that is targeted at them, not as part of the 6 o’clock news aimed at a broad demographic and designed to increase readership/viewership. If you’d like to get a flavour of the depth and breadth of public relations activities that are not marketing communications-focused (i.e. not about supporting marketing efforts or, I’ll confess, what those of us who aren’t really into marcomms describe a little snottily as ‘pushing product’), follow my former boss on Twitter, @boydneil, or start reading his blog, especially posts like this one, in which he tackles the issue of corporate reputation management and demolishes the idiotic utterances of people who know nothing about the subject but continue to prattle. Some people are even more articulate when they’re ‘exercised.’

Marcel Lebrun has a lovely post here about what actually constitutes listening, and he makes the point I was initially trying to make much more succinctly than I’ve done. Part of listening is responding. And if you’re a media outlet or a journalist crowing about how many followers you have while you’re following less than a tenth of those people, you’re talking at people, not conversing with them. You’re like the playground bully shouting everyone else down.

So – paragraphs ago I promised to talk about the good, not just the bad and the ugly. Here’s a list of mainstream media folk who are doing it right on Twitter – and doing right by the Twitterverse:

Mathew Ingram, former tech writer for the Globe and Mail, now the Globe’s new communities editor.

What he’s doing right: everything. He listens. He engages. He follows lots of people. He checks his @ messages and responds when appropriate. He passes on useful/helpful/interesting information he’s received from others (retweets, or RT in Twitspeak).  Could you please speak to the rest of the Globe and Mail folks and help turn the projectile vomiting into barely audible burps though? Thanks. @mathewingram

Alexis Madrigal, Wired Science writer and author of an amazing forthcoming book on the history of green technology.

What he’s doing right: everything. He listens. He responds. He says thank you. He’s actually quite extravagant in his praise. (That Tweet you sent about me made my year, Alex). @alexismadrigal

CKNW AM 980, local Vancouver talk radio station.

What CKNW’s doing right: They got onto Twitter and searched for folk to follow. There was some nonsense being tweeted about their unfollowing people and following them again and unfollowing them and following them to build their number of followers. I saw no evidence of this – nor did it make sense to me. They started to follow me, I followed ‘em back – we haven’t fallen out of love yet, despite a tweet or two I’ve sent out about my disdain for talk radio.

The fact that I’m a public broadcasting, Globe and Mail, Jane Austen-adoring intellectual snob who’s never made it through to the end of a single talk radio show doesn’t matter. Some of my clients need to reach CKNW’s audience (some of their shows have had the highest audience reach in the entire province of British Columbia), and I don’t allow my personal taste to adversely affect my work on behalf of clients. (And I do listen to the segments when my clients are on talk radio. And to as much of it as I can bear.)

Within days of establishing a Twitter presence, CKNW did a Twitpoll asking people how they wanted to be communicated with. You can’t kiss a radio station, can you. Pity. And then they took the advice of the folks who responded. ‘You have spoken – 74% of you want a Tweet of our show lineup with brief description & link to show page. Done!’ 

Right now, CKNW is following 2000 people – and being followed by only about 1161. Way to go, CKNW. Not only that, but when I sent them an @CKNW message today in response to an item they’d tweeted, they replied and we – gasp – had a conversation! Also doing some really neat things regarding breaking news, namely alerting folks to breaking stories and asking for information/updates/photos to be tweeted to them. Like this one:  ’Vandals have targeted the 2010 Olympic countdown clock in Downtown Vancouver. If you are in the area Tweet @cknw and send photos.’ One teeny tiny suggestion for improvement: let us know who’s doing the actual tweeting, who the humans behind the typing fingers are. @cknw

Granville Magazine Online, ‘Sustainable city living magazine and website. Tweets by digital editor Hilary Henegar.’

What Granville Magazine Online’s doing right: everything. I joked with Hilary the other day that I was so delighted with the way she was managing Granville’s social media strategy that I was going to create an award just for her. Here’s your Roofie, Hilary. You’re genuine, you’re attentive, you’re a very real person, and you’re someone I look forward to meeting and to working with on behalf of clients. Hilary does all the right things: doesn’t just blast out links to Granville articles, she tweets and retweets items of interest, pays attention to her followers, asks questions, even responds to blog post comments via Twitter (as well as on the posts themselves). I warn you though Hilary that I’m a bad influence and will try to persuade you that this giving up coffee thing is just plain silly. @granvillemagazine

CBC3, the online arm of the radio network.

What CBC 3 is doing right:  They’re not very active on Twitter, but they’re paying attention. When I had trouble listening to a podcast, they were very responsive, suggested what the problem might be, and have earned my gratitude for so doing. I’d like to give the rest of the CBC the same review, but I’m afraid that despite seminars on social media CBC’s conducted for its staff both in Vancouver and Toronto, for the most part they’re not getting it. One of the main motivations for this post was the Tweet sent out by Nora @SparkCBC (you know, the show that’s about ‘technology, trends, and fresh ideas’) towards the end of today’s Twitter demo for Toronto CBC-ers: “Wondering if Twitter is just full of marketing people and PR people.” Well gee, I guess you’d have the answer to that question if your follower:following ratio was a little better than 1232:151. Or if you ever read or responded to your @ messages. Would you like me to introduce you to the science community on Twitter? Help yourself to some of the folks I follow/am followed by.

Oh and by the way, I’m totally shocked to discover that CBC’s online web presence has outsourced its comment monitoring and moderation – it does explain a lot though. While I faithfully read my CBC news emails twice a day, I can’t often bear to read the comments. Usually when nasty and stupid comments are posted other commenters will do a pile-on, but that isn’t exactly what should be happening – and I’ve seen a lot of truly insensitive remarks on a variety of issues, not just the one linked to above. I won’t be the first to point out that you are Canada’s publicly funded news source – well – the lawyers will sort that one out and something will be learned from the exercise. @CBCRadio3

And finally, Darren Waters, the BBC Technology News web site editor, deserves a special mention. His follower:following ratio isn’t all that great, 2208:470, but that’s his business. He checks his @ messages and responds to them, he consults his followers (Question: how would you like BBC News to engage with Twitter? Answers in a Tweet please?) – the man even says thank you (Thankyou everyone for all your comments about using Twitter at BBC News. I’ve pulled together some thoughts for the bosses.). Oh and his birthday is February 3. And he’s not fussed – cake or cookies. But he’s mad keen about rugby and his support for Wales verges on the pleasantly rabid. His presence on Twitter is refreshing. I particularly liked it when he accused another British (non BBC of course) journalist of breaking an embargo. And to his everlasting credit, I have never once seen him tweet about the number of followers he has (yes I’m talking about you, @rory147). Perhaps it’s because Darren knows that editing, like public relations, is one of the helping professions. @darrenwaters

Note: Twitter follower/following numbers accurate as of 9PM PST Thursday, February 12. Posted tweets were cut and pasted from Twitter streams. I’m not even going to get into the fight between the PR person and the former National Post reporter that ensued this week. This is, for the most part, a PG-rated web site.

I would have loved to attend, but Chicago’s a long way to go for an afternoon, and given the uncertainties of winter travel from YVR, I decided to live vicariously and hope the presentations were filmed for future consumption

I really like the goal-oriented approach outlined by Stan Joosten, Director of Holistic Consumer Communications for Proctor & Gamble. It’s a classic example of strategy-in-action, as opposed to a tactics-based approach to communications.  

His presentation focused on three key points: 

• know your brand
• empower your brand fans
• replace or augment market research.

Organizations that have been around as long as P&G have been on the branding treadmill for decades now. They’ve devoted incredible human and monetary resources to creating and promoting their brands. In fact, P&G became the US’s largest advertiser in 2005. Imagine having revenues of $4.61 billion, let alone that kind of money to spend on advertising – it’s rather mind-boggling.

Regardless of where you land on the PR versus advertising spectrum though, it’s important to recognize that traditional advertising accomplishes none of the goals Joosten has outlined. I will contend that all market research is skewed, in one way or another – and I don’t think you need to be a statistical expert to know that instinctively. I’ve done market research myself on a couple of occasions, on the phone and in person. After less than 10 hours you start to realize there’s a particular type of person who consents to participate – with or without inducements – in focus groups and surveys. (They tend to be the same sort of people who hold doors open and who still say ‘excuse me’ before pushing past people at the grocery store.) But all the folks who refuse to answer surveys and are unwilling to be part of focus groups still use soap, wash their clothes, clean their bathtubs – and make purchasing decisions each and every day.

So in order to know your brand, you have to listen not only to the branding experts who’ve created the brand and listed what they hope its attributes will be, you have to listen – and be willing to hear – what your brand really is.

That can sometimes be a painful experience when you’re in a highly competitive market. The former market leader in radios probably doesn’t want to hear the cellphones it’s poured millions into creating and marketing are considered clunky, ugly, expensive, and totally unhip – but when it ends up a distant third in the cellphone manufacturing market, not listening to the message would be a big mistake – as would failing to do some course correction so it can compete on at least one front.

But of the three goals Joosten outlined, perhaps the most revolutionary – and the most necessary –  is the middle one: empower your brand fans. People listen to other people. They listen especially hard to other people they trust. Whether those people are mainstream media (who can at least be trusted to be familiar with the competition), media 2.0 (the bloggers who rarely have anything to gain by waxing enthusiastic about the products they like), or Mrs. McGillicuddy down the block who has three boys all in soccer and has a deeply vested interest in getting grass stains out of clothing, doesn’t matter. And by empowering your brand champions, you can exponentially increase the audience you reach.

How do you empower them? Connect with them. Ask for feedback. Make it easy for them to get in touch with you. Use social media as well as more traditional forms of communication. Think of Twitter, Facebook, and your corporate blog as other versions of the toll-free phone line, and be every bit as human and as genuine in your interactions via social media as your customer service reps are trained to be. And then reap the corporate rewards (including the savings in market research and advertising spend!).

There is Outsmarts, our strategic partner, of course.

But now, apparently, there’s a guy in Ottawa of whom I’d never heard, Andy Nulman (are you sure that isn’t a made-up name, BTW?).

But I’m intrigued by him for at least four reasons:

• his use of a viral marketing campaign that seems to be working;
• the fact that I came across his offer of a free copy of his latest book, Pow! Profiting from the Power of Surprise on Bob Ledrew’s blog (and Bob has to be one of the best, most genuine self promoters I’ve never met but have often heard on CBC Radio and read on his blog – an always-uneasy line for a PR person to walk but one he walks very well);
• the great title – because it makes a lot of sense – punchy works; and
• because it’s time we started talking about marketing at home, instead of listening to the incessant bleating of those whose immediate market is 10 times our own. There are regional/societal differences in how to market to different groups – it would be nice to know how to market to Canadians rather than Americans.

Drapes herself in largish Canadian flag and stalks off. I would very much like to read your book, Andy.