Program enhancement via live blogging and live tweeting
This week I was reminded by Melissa Sweet that the Banff Science Communications 2011 program was in progress. I had noticed it a few weeks ago, but had forgotten about it. Using the hashtag #banffscience, Melissa has almost single-handedly collated and curated information from talks, classes, and blog posts about this program for two weeks. The only reason I discovered she was doing so was because I follow enough scientists and science journalists on Twitter to see retweets and start following her and the hashtag, occasionally contributing an article or two I’d discovered (testimony that Canadian scientists are being muzzled by the Privy Council Office in Ottawa was something I thought these science communications people might want to discuss, for instance, so I contributed breaking news on the silencing of Department of Fisheries and Oceans’ Dr. Kristi Miller – here’s a roundup of that coverage). When you’re attending a program as intensive as this one, you’re not always able to follow the news.
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?
Media prep, Skeptical Radio, and science-y books for all
Several weeks ago it occurred to me that we should have a Canada Reads for non-fiction – and more specifically, for books that appeal to scientists and sceptics (or skeptics, as they call themselves) – to be known as Skeptical Canada Reads.
Naturally I couldn’t keep this idea to myself, and proposed it to the wonderful folks at Skeptical Radio out of Edmonton. Of course, I wanted to do this before Christmas too, because it’s THE season in the book business. I must have forgotten I’m no longer working for a global PR firm with a bevy of assistant consultants at my beck and call (ha!) and enough clout to pitch this to my former firm as a pro bono project (ha! ha!).
Luckily wiser heads than mine prevailed, and the good folks at Skeptical Radio came back to me with a twist on my idea (brainstorming by email): a special pre-Christmas show devoted to great science books (many, but not all of them, written by great scientists). Much to my surprise, I found myself invited to be a guest on the show.
Cue cold sweat. Here’s my dirty little secret: I do know how hard it is to be a spokesperson, and I don’t like being one. Nor, as a PR person, am I supposed to be part of the story – my role is a combination of cheerleader, counsellor, and stage mother. I’m not the star: my clients are. This is why I work so hard on their behalf to develop key messages, ensure they’re media trained, do comprehensive interview preps for them, try to catch all their appearances/read and analyze their media coverage so I can help them do it better next time around.
However, every once in a while it’s good for me to get a taste of my own medicine and a reminder that as I’m issuing ‘say this, don’t say that’ orders and tweaking phrases, this isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do. The good news: I had done a four-page interview prep for myself, and had even arranged the pages so I could see them all without rustling while recording the interview via Skype. The bad news: I was nervous. The worse news: I had neglected to ask that most fundamental of questions, what form will the interview take? So I was little startled when it turned out I was expected to talk for three minutes (Desiree Schell, the host, said she’d prompt me and edit out her prompts afterwards, but that seemed like too much work for her to have do, so I just swallowed hard and told myself I could do this). Apparently I could – she said afterwards no one had ever talked for three minutes straight without being prompted. Wind me up….
Here are the books I talked about:
Massive: The Hunt for the God Particle – Ian Sample
Bright Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America – Barbara Ehrenreich
Bad Ideas?: An Arresting History of Our Inventions – Sir Robert Winston
Newton and the Counterfeiter – Thomas Levenson
Inventing Green* – Alexis Madrigal (due in spring 2011)
The Sky’s Dark Labyrinth* – Stuart Clark (due in spring 2011)
Solar – Ian McEwan
The Honest Look – Jenny Rohn
The Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse – Jennifer Ouellette
Written in Stone: Evolution, the Fossil Record, and our Place in Nature – Brian Switek
And here’s the podcast in its entirety (I’m on starting at about 31:00). It’s a great show, with a wonderful variety of suggestions for the serious, the curious, and the hard-to-buy-for on any gift-giving list (don’t forget December babies need birthday presents too). Oh and that word I swallowed when trying to talk about Bright-Sided? That was ‘Calvinism.’ Erm – and I seem to have taken closer to six minutes than three. But mercifully my mispronunciation of both Tycho and Brache got edited out.*
* This cannot be considered proof of God’s existence, but should instead be considered proof that I am, in fact, both loquacious and garrulous.
The importance of sitting in on interviews
While I wouldn’t call it a groundswell by any means, I was startled to encounter not one but two articles in a week that challenged the notion of having a public relations/corporate communications person sit in on interviews.
The first was this interview with Yann Martel by The Guardian‘s Stephen Moss, who admits that his first move is to ‘rather rudely insist that the young woman who is steering him round the UK and Ireland on the publicity tour for his new novel, Beatrice and Virgil, absent herself from the room while we talk.’
Ahem. I’m guessing Stephen Moss is a tad old school, shall we say, in terms of his views on PR folks? I think I might perhaps counter with the notion that anyone smart enough to get a more than one million dollar advance from a publisher in this day and age can probably figure out how to take a taxi by himself and get to an appointed meeting in a hotel, especially in a country where his own mother tongue is spoken. And that, therefore, the young woman’s role might have been just a bit more than merely that of courier/chaperone.
But then I saw this article from the fine folks at Knight Science Journalism Tracker at MIT, in which the suggestion was made that disclosure is necessary when a public information officer (who fills the role of a corporate communications or public relations person) sits in on an interview – and that the situation should be avoided at all costs to avoid having the interview ‘influenced.’ Read more »
Social media for authors
While still researching my forthcoming post on book social networking sites, I wanted to share this video with you. Thanks to Sarah Caldwell of Princeton University Press for bringing it to my attention. I think it’ll be required viewing for the next new author with whom I start working – just so s/he’ll be forewarned of the phone calls to come.
Social media could drive a public relations renaissance
So you’re all up to speed on the new rules of engagement for marketing and public relations and how important it is to abandon control of the ‘message’ and engage with your various audiences (the people formerly categorized as ‘stakeholders’ although this term is now out of favour as well, I’m not quite sure why) and the importance of ‘transparency’ and the fact that you’d better get on the social media bandwagon because at the rate things are going, there won’t be many mainstream media outlets left to whom you can tell your corporate story.
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. Read more »
Crimes against Twitter: how mainstream media and marketers are messing up
The bewildered who aren’t yet tweeting may well be puzzled by the plethora of articles they’re suddenly reading in publications as far flung as the Vancouver Sun, the Globe and Mail, the New York Times, The Guardian, The Spectator, Business Week…. Certainly the English-speaking world is suddenly all atwitter about Twitter (or at least the portion of it who still read either real or virtual newspapers and magazines). Read more »
Social media lets you listen to your customers
I’m working on a media release (honest!), but came across this blog post from James Dickey, reporting on one of the presentations made at Blogwell on January 22, 2009. Eight organizations (Procter & Gamble, Home Depot, the Mayo Clinic, the US Coast Guard, H&R Block, Sharpie, Walmart, and Allstate) presented case studies on their use of social media in a single afternoon in Chicago.
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!).
21st Century public relations
I wouldn’t say this was the world’s best video, but it does make a few good points.
1. Writing well is the single most important foundation skill for PR practitioners.
2. Knowing your client’s business (which includes knowing what’s going on in your client’s industry and in the business world in general) is the single greatest value add you get when you hire a PR firm or public relations professional.
3. Love the line about needing a ‘spine or a backbone to tell clients what they need to hear.’ This is about managing expectations: ‘tell them some things that they may not want to hear.’ Read more »
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