M Booth’s very own Digisquad and our social media mentoring program were featured in the August issue of PRWeek!
M Booth & Associates created a group called “Digisquad.” It meets weekly about social media and includes at least one employee from every practice area. Account supervisors and SAEs within Digisquad are part of the agency’s social media mentoring program, in which the junior staffers show SVPs how to use social networking for personal use.
“We took a personal approach to social media because SVPs are already very smart strategists,” says Josh Rosenberg, SVP and director of FirstWord Digital at M Booth. “They just need to experience the value of communicating this way.”
Fleet Week: In London this week, a fleet of scented taxis will hit the streets – and no, the scent will not be “dirty laundry.” English perfume house Penhaligon’s is sending out scented (and adorably decorated!) cars; each one will smell like a different perfume and the driver will be trained to talk about the product.
New Use for Parking Meters: In an effort to collect money for Montreal’s homeless, the city is using retired parking meters as piggy banks. Passersby are encouraged to drop coins in – and in the past three years they have raised CDN $23,000. This year they revamped the meters – local celebs and organizations were asked to adopt and paint them for a more personal touch.
Dan 3.0: In the newest attempt of crowdsourcing life, Dan Brown (of “How to Solve a Rubik’s Cube” fame) will be putting his life in the hands of YouTube users. For an entire year. He has laid down some ground rules: he won’t dump his girlfriend or do anything illegal or harmful to others (odds are he WILL ice a bro, though…), and he does have veto power. We hope our request for him to bake 1,000 mini red velvet cupcakes and send them to us here at 300 Park Ave South, New York, NY 10010 doesn’t get turned down.
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I’m an AP Stylebook devotee — I read it cover to cover when I was studying journalism at NYU, which is probably not something I should tell people — but some of its rules are just archaic and absurd. For instance, I’ve always taken issue with the one about spelling website as “Web site.” Luckily, the AP Stylebook gods have finally gotten with the times and officially acknowledged that “website” is just fine. Geeky grammar nerds, rejoice!
As a side note, geeky grammar nerds with a sense of humor should be sure to follow @FakeAPStylebook on Twitter. Just make sure you don’t incorporate those rules into your next press release.
Today, Gawker’s Ryan Tate posted a story entitled “Three Annoying Habits of the Laziest Journalists on Twitter.” In a nutshell, Gawker hates journalists who (1) Tweet a“barrage of rushed, repetitive questions,” (2) Make their “heartless pursuit of the story totally obvious” and (3) rhyme gratuitously on Twitter. Being the unapologetical bunch they are, they’ve named names. Most horrifyingly…USA Today’s Barbara De Lollis.
Is this not why there’s an “unfollow” button? If people are so annoyed by these journalists’ tweets, why are they following them? I’m sure many PR professionals will agree that Barb and her cohorts make it easier to track what they’re writing about, thus enabling us to send appropriate information. Other professions are using Twitter to communicate directly to their trade audiences and gather feedback and research more quickly, so why can’t journalists?
Sure, Barb could be more engaging and interactive with her followers and show some more personality in her tweets - that’d probably make her queries more appealing to her readers and would probably generate more responses from them. But hey, from a professional standpoint, her tweets serve their purpose to the PR community. So, to answer Tate’s question “Do any of De Lollis’ followers actually answer…?” Yes, we do!
As for the rhyming lady, well unless her followers are all in kindergarten, that’s just not cool.
It’s an exciting day here at M Booth! We are extremely excited to join the Next Fifteen family. And don’t worry, we’ll still be the same M Booth you know and love.
TechCrunch likes calling out thoughtless, and often old-school, PR practitioners for the sins they commit in the name of the profession. Over the weekend, Robin Wauters wrote an interesting and funny post disparaging the stale, ambiguous, and downright inaccurate language we often find in press releases, e.g. leading, revolutionary, cutting-edge, synergy, and almost all superlatives.
As the business environments PR pros work in change, so must PR tactics. Here’s to changing with the times.
-Tom
P.S. I think Robin’s list missed paradigm shift – whatever that means.
Someone should be fired. In fact, a bunch of people should be fired from Horizon Realty Group in Chicago. By now, most have us have heard that Horizon is suing one of their tenants for $50,000 for libel. The suit is a response to Amanda Bonnen’s tweet complaining that her apartment was moldy. Bonnen has about 20 followers and is not an especially active twitterer, but Horizon decided to sue, and later described themselves as “a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization,” according to Mashable and other sources.
What could have been a message that went unnoticed is now all over the Web and in print media. Horizon’s decision to sue has amplified the negativity and vilified the organization. This could be the most colossal PR blunder I’ve ever witnessed. Not to mention that the case has no chance in court. The person who should be charged with libel is whoever decided to bring the suit – that’s the person most culpable for defaming the company’s image. I’d be more critical of the organization, but I need to be careful – I can’t afford to get sued.
While everyone was stuffing themselves with barbecue and watching fireworks this weekend, The New York Times published an article that’s a must-read for all PR folks. The piece examines how the profession of public relations is changing in the digital age — it’s becoming more about bloggers and online influencers and less about just traditional print and broadcast journalists. Yet publicists are still necessary, because someone needs to know who these people are and how best to reach them.
The article also briefly touches upon the need for a new system of PR metrics, which is a topic we are constantly exploring here at M Booth:
Instead of calculating the impressions an article gets by estimating a publication’s circulation and pass-along rate, [Brian] Solis counts the number of people who tweeted about a company and their combined following, the number of retweets or clicks on links, as well as traffic from Facebook and other social networks.
Many people don’t realize that the PR profession is about much more than straight-up media relations, but it is — and it’s continuing to change before our eyes.
A recent survey of 449 bloggers from 21 countries found that 90% of them welcome contact from PR people. (They like us, they really like us!) In fact, over 96% of American bloggers said they are contacted by PR folks on a weekly basis.
Many bloggers said they appreciate it when publicists are able to supply photographs, charts/graphs and videos. The bloggers’ pet peeves about PR pros included:
PR people continue to blindly send corporate press releases to bloggers.
PR professionals are failing to read the blogs and truly understand their target bloggers’ communities.
They seem to expect bloggers to post corporate material, demonstrating a lack of understanding of the medium and the very reason why bloggers blog.
They treat bloggers as they would journalists - not as influencers, which is more appropriate.
Definitely some good points that we always keep in mind here at M Booth!
“ [Brand representatives on Twitter] are not acting like spokespeople, but real people. You have to be careful about what you say while, at the same time, be much more personal than the average corporate P.R. guy. You need people who understand the mores and etiquette. Not everyone knows how to do that.
Josh Bernoff in The New York Times
Cision recently launchedJournalistTweets, a site that shows tweets from members of the media on Twitter. However, there don’t seem to be too many journalists listed as yet, since the same ones keep coming up.
Google is holding a Doodle 4 Google contest for kids to submit their own “Google doodle,” to the theme of “What I Wish for the World.” You can vote on the finalists, and the winner will be awarded a $15,000 college scholarship, a trip to the Google New York office, a laptop computer, and a t-shirt printed with their doodle. Their school will receive a $25,000 technology grant towards the establishment/improvement of a computer lab.
The video above features the President of Domino’s USA responding to a PR crisis that erupted this week after two Domino’s employees posted an online video of them tampering with food in, um…pretty gross ways.
While the original video is fodder enough for controversy, what’s really fascinating (and frightening) is how social media sites like YouTube can quite literally deface a company as large as Domino’s in a matter of hours. That localized stunts can be broadcast internationally with the quick click of a button means that crisis communications is a whole new beast in the digital age—the Domino’s video has been viewed over one million times, and discussions have been very lively on forums like Twitter.
Domino’s is getting high praise, however, for its response to crisis: a YouTube response and the formation of a twitter handle, @dpzinfo, to address customer concerns. By communicating with customers through the very same medium that so easily soiled its reputation, Domino’s has proven its moxy and social media dexterity. Unfortunately, this incident will forever be a cautionary tale for other companies.
![While everyone was stuffing themselves with barbecue and watching fireworks this weekend, The New York Times published an article that’s a must-read for all PR folks. The piece examines how the profession of public relations is changing in the digital age — it’s becoming more about bloggers and online influencers and less about just traditional print and broadcast journalists. Yet publicists are still necessary, because someone needs to know who these people are and how best to reach them.
The article also briefly touches upon the need for a new system of PR metrics, which is a topic we are constantly exploring here at M Booth:
Instead of calculating the impressions an article gets by estimating a publication’s circulation and pass-along rate, [Brian] Solis counts the number of people who tweeted about a company and their combined following, the number of retweets or clicks on links, as well as traffic from Facebook and other social networks.
Many people don’t realize that the PR profession is about much more than straight-up media relations, but it is — and it’s continuing to change before our eyes.
—Alyssa](http://28.media.tumblr.com/Ktn5HONUJpk3zs6ysWrFj0qno1_500.jpg)
