hollywood big start: March 2011

This morning I attended PR Newswires "Work that Content! Tactics and Tools to Make Your Message Resonate" by Michael Pranikoff, Global Director - Emerging Media, PR Newswire. I have seen him speak in the past and I always enjoy his point of view on the space.

You can follow him on Twitter @mpranikoff
The hashtag for the event #prnedu

I'm always a bit skeptical when a vendor does a presentation and I don't want to hear them pitch their services, but PR Newswire does a good job of not pitching.

The biggest takeaway from the presentation is the title of this post, "Are you driving the conversation or are you letting go of control?" Most presentations I go to you hear, your brand is now owned by your consumers, Google is your homepage and what Google and user generated content says about you is who you are. I believe all of this to a point, but if you are sitting around and thinking you can't do anything about it, then you have given up control. Every brand and company are now in the media business and should be creating content. You have no control over what your stakeholders do with this content, but you can drive the conversations around your brand by adding value to the conversation. When you are creating content think about making it directional. Where do you want to drive readers of your content? Trust will continue to replace attention as the currency of the web and businesses need to
stop "pushing" content and start producing content that consumers want to "pull".

Another great point brought up was, is your content embeddable? Are you allowing visitors to embed your videos, newsfeeds, RSS, images, etc. into their websites and social media assets? If not, why not? Let people grab your content and use it and share it. The days of expecting someone to just visit your website to learn about you are over.

I like to tell my staff that if I learn one thing in a presentation then it was successful for me. The biggest thing I learned was to link to your press release on PR Newswire instead of to your website version of the release. This seems counterintuitive, but chances are PR Newswire has a higher page rank then your website does, so leverage their page rank to drive SEO results.

A good reminder regarding tweetable headlines is that they should be 65-80 characters to ensure that when your tweet is picked up in search engines, the title is not getting cut off in the description.

Also don't worry about always creating original content. Yahoo News and Google News are the largest news sites yet they don't create any original content

@jaredroy

Toni of tu dance

Horton technique

in my next life

Brand Journalism: The Rise of Non-Fiction Advertising #sxsw Session

hashtag #brandjo

Hard to believe it's been 11 years since The Cluetrain Manifesto, and we're still doing the same panel. And we're still trying to teach big companies and ad agencies how to communicate like humans, how to listen, and how to use transparency as a messaging tactic. Brand Journalism is a way to take those decade-old ideas and incorporate them into actual campaigns (we know, we've done it). The first step is to teach agencies and clients to think like publishers instead of marketers--it's not a new idea, but it's one that is rarely executed well. In this panel, Brand Journalism pioneers will share some of the secrets, successes, and obstacles of their award-winning campaigns.

An editorial approach to brand building. Do we need to start thinking like a publisher?

Audio of session

Presenters

Bob Garfield, Bob Garfield LLC

Brian Clark, Partner/CEO, GMD Studios

David Eastman

Kyle Monson, Editor, JWT

Shiv Singh, Mktg, PepsiCo

So what does this mean? The short description is taking an editorial approach to brand building. If you are in branding its not a choice anymore, it's imperative to look at how you are approaching branding.

An example of brand as a journalist is mormon.org. They have turned their brand over to church members to tell their stories and they are not doing any editing of the stories.

Today's consumers are more interested in speaking to your employees instead of those who write your mission statement. Think really hard about this. Are you ready to turn your brand over to your employees and consumers?

The Chrysler social media issue was brought up in this session and the panel made some good points. Their thoughts were that the Chrysler mistake was not having an employee tweeting. Brands should not outsource trust building. With an organization as big as Chrysler, why are they outsourcing their brand building and journalism to a social media agency and a 20 y/o running the Twitter account? Your journalists should be part of your organization, not outsourced. Do you outsource trust-building? AdAge's Garfield: "Chrysler Tweet shows conflict between nature of social media and control freakdom of brands." PR stands for public relations, why fire someone for saying something the public can actually relate to?

People like to bring up how many followers they have on Twitter and how many Likes they have on Facebook. What they need to realize is that its not the numbers, it's about the engagement metrics.

Advertising goals = recognition and awareness. Social media goals = credibility and trust. Where do they meet for brands? How do we add value to a consumer's life? Think about these questions when you putting together strategy. Branding magic happens when brand values and consumer values align.

@jaredroy