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?

Here’s the interview.

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.

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.

DeNel found me via a guest post I’d done on Kimberly Walsh’s East Coast by Choice blog and a comment I’d left on her own blog, where she’d reviewed Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel, The Lacuna. She took at look at my blog and got in touch via email to ask me to do a guest lecture to her class. Once we worked out the time and date logistics (since my East Coast sojourn was back in 1973 and I was pretty sure she didn’t have budget to fly me to Halifax), I stopped procrastinating about needing a computer with more juice, bought a refurbished iMac, and mastered Skype for once and for all.

My first test run on Skype taught me a valuable lesson: makeup required for Skype video because even north light produces glare, and I didn’t want to look like a burn victim with unhealed skin grafts (no offense intended). That meant an earlier start for me, but that’s ok – I didn’t want to scare people or rattle myself (although I have to say, the great advantage of doing an in-person talk is that you don’t have to look at yourself while you’re doing it – at least not after the rehearsing-in-front-of-a-mirror segment of the procedure is over).

DeNel and I agreed to try to keep the experience as technologically simple as possible. I emailed her the link to the presentation I planned to use (which I’d found on my friend Allen Gibson’s blog) so she could run the PowerPoint and I could focus on trying to make sense.

Here it is:

Marta Kagan

As follow up, I sent DeNel an email recommending a few books for her students, namely:

The New Rules of Marketing & PR – David Meerman Scott
The New Influencers: A Marketer’s Guide to the New Social Media – Paul Gillin
Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies – Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
Friends with Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook – Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo

I also sent a link to Mhairi Petrovic’s web site, which I mentioned in my talk. Her blog (here’s the feed so you can subscribe) is a classic example of how to position yourself as a thought leader in a particular space (social media marketing – I rely on Mhairi’s posts to ensure I have at least a passing acquaintance with what’s happening in that hyper-evolutionary field).

I spoke briefly about the need to customize social media strategies, particularly in the context of small businesses and a recent post I’d read that questioned the value of social media for small businesses in particular. One student challenged me on this (rightly so!), based on her internship work experience with a local Halifax bakery (I’m hoping she’ll remind me of the name of the bakery in the comments section), which gave me a chance to talk about the importance of geolocation services for location-specific businesses, regardless of whether they’re seeking to expand to other cities or franchise. I also mentioned the stellar job Sarah Petegree of Bray’s Cottage Pork Pies is doing with combined social media and traditional PR strategies. I should also have mentioned another UK company, Wiggly Wigglers. The Marketing Profs case study I read was the first I’d come across that talked actual dollars and ROI for social media marketing vs traditional advertising spend (afraid that one is paid content so I can’t link to it here). From what I can remember, ad spend was cut by more than 85% and sales increased by more than 300%.

We talked very briefly about measurement of social media efforts – a vast subject in and of itself, and I suggested a customized approach to that as well, but one that kept an eye on some sort of bottom line – if not sales, then at least hits/web traffic/app download increases – something relatively tangible.

I also talked about the folly of attempting to do all your customer service via social media in general and Twitter in particular, and how disastrous that could be. Within five minutes of finishing the lecture, I came across this fantastic post from Radian 6 about how they manage connecting and engaging with customers online. Hint: by working both smart and hard at it.

For more social media smarts, here’s a video everyone needs to see, Social Media Revolution 2. As for the motivation for this post? Partly great content that needed to be consolidated in one linkable spot, but mostly because DeNel told me she’d assigned one of her students to monitor my blog. Time to generate some more content then!

To today’s MSVU students: you were a great crowd. Hope to hear from you in the comments below. C’mon. Try it. You’ll like it. See that big RSS feed button? Click on it, it won’t bite. Ultimately it will make your lives easier.

It’s a derogatory term, and I believe there are some terms and words that can never be reclaimed (in this I differ from the hiphop artists who have ‘reclaimed’ the ‘en’ word – in my view it would be better to let that one fade away to the point that 23rd-century folk who encounter it would have to ask what it meant).

Implicit in the word spin is the idea that deception is involved, facts are being turned on their heads, and/or there’s so much fast talking going on the truth would be unrecognizable even if it were part of the mix. The ‘truth’ is, it’s as much of an insult to call a public relations practitioner a ‘spin doctor’ as it is to call a woman a ‘chick.’ And it is a female-dominated profession, although not yet at the most senior levels.

Despite the cross-fertilization that occurs between journalists and PR practitioners (since writing well is the foundation skill for both professions), there is also the perception that journalists are those who ferret out the truth and present it objectively, while PR folks do their best to deflect, disguise, and distract from the truth. The notion of the muck-racking journalist being free of bias is laughable in the 21st Century. We wouldn’t have populist, right-wing, and left-wing media outlets if bias weren’t inherent in every medium, whether it’s the way the headline is written, the fact that the story is covered at all, or the selective presentation of facts. The notion that objectivity is in disrepute is, thankfully, permeating the zeitgeist – and not a moment too soon.

The inspiration for this post came not from the field of public relations, however, but rather from some tweets by Portuguese journalist and science communication PhD candidate Andréia Azevedo Soares (BordadoIngles on Twitter) re Mike Hulme‘s ideas on the climate change debate. Hulme is the author of Why We Disagree about Climate Change and recently gave a lecture at Imperial College London. (The book will be out in paperback in early 2010.)

Here are her tweets from Hulme’s Dec. 7, 2009, lecture (rearranged to appear in chronological order and edited into paragraph form):

Mike Hulme suggests there are six different ways to frame the climate change debate: market failure, technological hazard, global injustice. overconsumption, climate change as mostly natural and finally as a planetary ‘tipping point.’ Hulme shows that those different frames lead to different solutions to climate change. They relate to our various worldviews, beliefs, and values. Different framings suggest we need to recognise pluralism in our approaches to make climate change policies.

Oddly, I’ve rarely heard the term ‘framing’ used by a public relations practitioner. But it struck me as something that should be a integral part of the PR lexicon, since it is precisely what we do. From the Wikipedia definition, framing is ‘…an inevitable process of selective influence over the individual’s perception of the meanings attributed to words or phrases. A frame defines the packaging of an element of rhetoric in such a way as to encourage certain interpretations and to discourage others.’

Framing is inevitable, an involuntary reaction that is part of our effort to make sense of the world around us, its people and its problems. I particularly like the example used in the Wikipedia article of a wink vs a blink (although I’d argue both eyes close during a blink). The glass half full/glass half empty analogy probably works better, since by definition half means equal portions.

Whether you view the world through rose-coloured glasses or not, whether you think all politicians are dishonest or revere those who occupy the corridors of delegated power, whether you’re a MacHead or a PC fan, we all have filters we apply to information, and these filters affect our decision-making processes.

There is nothing illegal, immoral, or unethical about choosing a frame. You need to be aware that there’s more than one framing choice. You need to consider the fact that others won’t choose the same frame as you. Ultimately, though, you will have to either pick one or leave the picture unframed. Choosing a frame and developing a strategy for its presentation is the heart of public relations. As a practitioner, aligning yourself with clients whose framing aligns with your beliefs and values is the soul of a successful PR consultancy.

Perception has never been reality. It just appears to be. That, I suspect, is a natural consequence of the human condition.

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.