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?

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 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.’

I’m both mystified and saddened by this suggestion. The single biggest complaint PR people hear from journalists – both mainstream and bloggers – is that they’re not appropriately ‘pitched’ – in other words, not enough time and care has been taken by the PR person before approaching a journalist. Bloggers complain that PR people don’t read their blogs and journalists complain that they too have been inappropriately targeted.

Sitting in on interviews with clients is a learning experience for a PR person in many ways. Ultimately it ends up being a learning experience for the client as well. My presence in interviews is as discreet as it can be, given that I’m actually there and haven’t yet mastered invisibility. In fact, I usually take notes, because it’s part of my job to assess my client’s actual performance and to determine if more media training or coaching is required. It would never occur to me to intervene in an interview after the ground rules have been established (and sometimes they do need to be). I can, however, be helpful in a variety of ways once the interview’s done, by providing additional prepared background information (you know, like the interviewee’s bio, correct spelling of name, exact title, etc.), and by ensuring journalists can meet their deadlines by getting supplementary material like photos sent directly to their editors if necessary. I can also help the journalist by finding them someone else to interview if they need to consult an independent third party expert.

Do I influence the interview? In one way, I can definitively answer, Certainly not. I am not the spokesperson. On the other hand, my – and my colleagues’ –  influence is necessary prior to the actual interview. My job is to ensure I provide and deliver a spokesperson who’s ready, willing and able to answer the questions the journalist poses – and who can do so in a timely fashion to ensure the journalist’s deadlines are met. I’ve been to enough briefings with enough new clients to know that no journalist has time to listen to an hour-long dissertation so mired in random detail that the journalist has probably forgotten the question by the time the answer is obliquely approached. Fun though conversational segues are in real life, this is business, both for the client and for the journalist.

I’d also add that many times, as I’m ‘steering’ clients around to interviews, my role is to sense their mood, help them overcome their apprehensions, and get them into the right frame of mind to provide a focused interview. Some clients are too low key, too low energy in that hour or so before the actual interview and need to be psyched up. Others come close to hyper-ventilating, and need to be reassured – or, if I’m confident they actually know their stuff – distracted from the prospect of the interview, so that by the time we arrive and the interview actually happens, they’re ready to put their best foot forward. It’s very similar to the frame of mind in which you want to be when you arrive at a job interview. As opposed to rain-soaked, fly undone, with windblown hair and 10 minutes late, you know.

I once sat in on an interview and did have a question for the journalist later on. Not actually being the soul of tact, my question went something like, ‘That was a really non-linear approach to an interview – your questions were all over the map – what’s up with that?’ The journalist explained it was a technique he used to get more spontaneous answers from subjects. Which is fine with me – I infinitely prefer lateral thinkers. But it’s something many of the software and other engineers and scientists with whom I worked might find disconcerting – which means they’ll need a heads up if I arrange an interview for them with that particular journalist.

When the interview’s over, the client gets some frank but constructive feedback on their performance. Sometimes they get their knuckles rapped, not so much for what they’ve said during the interview but for the way they’ve treated the journalist. ‘So who watches this show anyway, housewives?’ and ‘Thanks to the five of you who bothered to dial in for this teleconference’ were two remarks that earned clients a few performance-enhancing tips from me for the next round.

But let me ask some of you journalists, bloggers, and PR folks out there: what’s your view on this issue? Frankly I think it’s one of the most important services I can provide to a client.

Bora Zivkovic, Online Community Manager at Public Library of Science, didn’t think much of the piece (at least that was my conclusion from his preface to tweeting it, which was ‘Hrmph…what do you think?’)

Here’s what I think: Begley generalizes and dances around the real issue. She lets a certain amount of frustration with some of the scientists she’s encountered seep into her piece. She makes some very good points regarding successful communication (that which is both clear and persuasive) when she talks about cultural differences between the US and the UK (although I don’t think she nails them precisely – that thing that happened in 1776 really was both the War of Independence and the American Revolution).

She gets closest to making the point implicit in her article explicit when she says, ‘Like evolutionary biologists before them, climate scientists also have failed to master “truthiness” … which their opponents – climate deniers and creationists – wield like a shiv.’

Having just finished Ian McEwan’s Solar, which I’ll be reviewing on my personal blog, I think the issue is both more complex and yet more clearly understandable.

‘Climate deniers’ in and of itself is an odd phrase, because no one denies climate exists. ‘Climate change deniers’ makes only slightly more sense – the more appropriate phrase should be ‘global warming deniers.’ And here we’re beginning to get to the crux of the matter.

Environmentalists sounding the alarm bells regarding what we’ve done to our world by allowing ourselves to become dependent on fossil fuels never sat down and thought about what their key messages were before they started engaging the public. Or if they did, they didn’t think them through sufficiently and consult widely enough amongst themselves before going public. ‘Global warming’ was a specious, no-win phrase from the get-go, frankly, since the explanations required to communicate what it actually is are daunting.

You can’t trot out a phrase you want to see in headlines and then backpedal furiously while you try to explain that global warming manifests itself not only in warmer, drier summers, but also in wetter, colder winters. Let’s be frank – we’re not all climatologists, nor do the vast majority of us aspire to be. By asking me to accept at face value something that’s highly counter-intuitive at the outset, without clearly explaining how to reconcile the two opposing facts, you’ve lost me.

What the ‘climate change deniers’ and ‘global warming deniers’ did right at the very outset was to dig into their deep pockets (because the oil and gas companies of the world are part of a now-entrenched financial hierarchy) and invest in communications advice to nail down their key messages. They went even further as the pro-environmental tide rose: they modified their messaging, their behaviour, and thus their perception among stakeholders.

The investment in a single wind farm by an oil and gas developer is as disproportionately positively perceived as the percentage of birch trees in a mixed deciduous/coniferous forest is overestimated if you don’t do an actual count of even a small area. Did you do that kind of study in your public school nature field trips? Try it sometime; you’ll be astonished.

The key messages of the oil and gas industry have been very clear:

• ‘Our form of energy creates and enables wealth and growth.’
• ‘The alternatives to fossil fuels will be both difficult to engineer and expensive to create.’
• ‘We live in an oil and gas-dependent world and we will continue to seek out new sources of fossil fuels until we’ve exhausted them so you can continue to live the lifestyle to which you think you’re entitled.’ (Zoom, zoom.)

In contrast, I’d be hard pressed, without doing a fair bit of research, to come up with three overarching key messages regarding climate change. Those three key messages would be only the beginning of the process, however, because one immediately needs to distinguish between natural cycles of climate change (those it would be very difficult for us to control) and those we’ve caused (and can therefore, theoretically at least, control by a change in our behaviours). Take a look at this paragraph from Wikipedia (and before you sneer, remember that this is what you’re going to get when you enter ‘climate change’ into a search engine – in other words, this is what most people looking for information are going to find first):

‘In recent usage, especially in the context of environmental policy, climate change usually refers to changes in modern climate. It may be qualified as anthropogenic climate change, more generally known as “global warming” or “anthropogenic global warming” (AGW).’

My head is already aching. I know that anthropogenic means ‘person-made’ (manmade if you want to be a stickler for Greek word origin). I’ve now got three terms that all mean the same thing (supposedly). And an acronym that certainly hasn’t caught on – AGW? Haven’t seen that in any of the thousands of mainstream media articles I’ve read on global/climate/warming/change in the last three decades. Except that they don’t mean the same thing, really. Or do they? When invasive plant forms suck up disproportionate amounts of water from the water table, drought can occur. And invasive plants can spread from any form of ‘disturbance’ – including floods and fire, not all of which are person-caused. Which then leads to a cycle of hauling food you can no longer grow yourself longer distances using finite and ozone-depleting resources and releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, thus creating more global/climate/warming/change….

There’s really no point in looking at manmade client change outside the context of non-anthropogenic climate change (and what is the scientific term for that? Again, more research on my part required.).

At this point I have to return to what I know something about, which is how to communicate. Key messages are the magic potion, and three key messages are the magic number, because that’s about all we can remember. It was Socrates, that Greek, who first articulated this, apparently.

• Key messages have to be jargon-free. (That means we’re going to use ‘manmade’ rather than anthropogenic, and if, when we’re working on these key messages, you continue to say anthropogenic, you will be slapped figuratively, if not literally.)
• Key messages have to answer the first question first. Before you can talk about the specific human behaviour that has you as a scientist up in arms (and your concerns will be different if you’re a marine biologist than they will be if you’re an astronomer), you have to take a huge step back and create overarching key messages. So the first question – regardless of whether you’re an astronomer or an oceanographer – is, ‘what is climate change?’
• Key messages have to be short. Why? Because short is memorable; long is not. I’m willing to bet that may be the one phrase – short is memorable, long is not – from this post that you’ll remember two days after reading it.

I’m going to break the rule of threes here to add one more point:

• Key messages have to be written, rewritten, massaged, edited, and perfected before they’re memorized. And then they have to be delivered in exactly the same innumerable times. That’s why they have to be good to begin with. This is not about controlling your spokesperson or your message. It’s about crafting your message so it will actually get through. Why are you more likely to remember that it has to be short to be memorable? Because I’ve now repeated it three times in this blog post. I don’t expect you to have studied rhetoric – I haven’t. But trust me, if you had, you would have learned the importance of repetition in successful communication.

Here are two excellent articles on crafting key messages. The first is Dr. Judith M. Newman’s, in which she defines and gives a few examples of key messages. Perhaps the most important point she makes is when she says key messages ‘open the door to direct communication…because they bridge [the gap] between what your audience already knows and where you are trying to take them.’ (emphasis added)

The second is from the Communications Overtones blog, in which Kami Watson Huyse outlines a nice little three-part formula for developing key messages: claim, fact, example.

So here’s my challenge (you knew that was coming, didn’t you?) to all the scientists and environmentalists I know. In the comments section, let’s see if we can, together, craft three overarching key messages on climate change – both manmade and non-manmade. And then let’s take a stab at creating the next set of key messages that relate solely to manmade climate change.

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!).

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.’

Managing expectations can be either a pleasant or an unpleasant task, depending on what your client’s expectations are. If it’s front-page/top story mainstream media coverage, the client is a local start-up with a web site, and you’ve realized, by following mainstream and social media for years that the tide is turning and journalists have become bored with topic (as happened during the dotcom bust), you need to manage the client’s expectations downwards and remind them that PR is a process, and good results don’t happen instantaneously.

If it’s a client who assures you that this isn’t a good day/week/month/year to get media coverage, expectations may need to be managed upwards. There are still slow news days. You don’t know whether you’re going to be successful unless – and until – you try. Public relations professionals read, view, analyze, and interact with media all the time. Let me blunt here: if you hire someone to put a new roof on your house, do you micromanage your roofer? Instead of micromanaging your public relations consultant and contradicting them at every turn based on your sporadic reading/viewing of local media, take the time to find a consultant you trust. And then trust them to know what they’re doing.

Here’s a great paragraph from Inmedia Public Relations:

…[T]he role of advocate is more than simply conveying our clients’ stories to the outlets that matter. We must also be willing to impress upon clients the agendas, or the simple realities, of the markets we are trying to reach on their behalf. What elements of their story must we have to effectively attract and retain the attention of the media we are targeting? What works? What doesn’t? How is the way the client wants to approach things more of a hindrance than a help to our efforts? To adequately serve our clients, we must deliver frank and honest counsel that sometimes includes feedback from the marketplace that may be painful to hear.

And finally, my response to one of GG Johnston’s 2009 PR predictions. The Denver consultant said:

The debate will rage on about whether or not PR firms can participate in online conversations on behalf of their clients. Would we call and pretend to actually be our clients in one-on-one conversations on the phone? No, certainly not. So, why would we pretend to actually be our clients on blogs, micro-blogs and forums? The answer is, we wouldn’t.

To which I replied:

In the same way we have to media train our clients, we need to provide them with social media training and alert them to social media opportunities they’re not aware of/not maximizing. It’s really no different than creating an editorial calendar and pitching mainstream media – we never did the interviews for clients either, did we?