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.”

Nice job, Josh!

—Alyssa

Amazingly, the Twitter guys handle their PR all by themselves. “We don’t work with any PR agencies or consultants. Inbound press is about 75-100 a day and we try to answer as much as possible,” founder Biz Stone told Joe from PRNewser. It’s kind of crazy that they can run Twitter and field dozens of press inquiries daily, all on their own! Even so, they have no immediate plans to invest in any public relations help.

—Alyssa

PRNewser tells us that our PR database company, Cision, is planning to add journalists’ Twitter names to the service this year. I’m not sure how journalists will feel about this, as many of them have been irked by the number of publicists following them. However, I’ve seen others who are appreciative of the convenience it affords them — all they have to do is tweet a query, and they instantly receive a hundred instant answers from Twittering PR folks.

Whenever someone tells me they don’t understand how Twitter can help them at work, I tell them about the media placements I’ve garnered for my clients as a result of opportunities I spotted on my tweetstream. Not to mention the dozens of professional connections I’ve made that were initiated through the site. Twitter makes me better at my job, which is why I don’t mind that sometimes it makes me feel like I have ADD.

—Alyssa

Josh and I attended the Bad Pitch Blog’s 3-Year Anniversary party last night, where we chatted with practically every NYC publicist who is on Twitter. Check out Joe Ciarallo’s roundup and interview with hosts Richard Laermer and Kevin Dugan on PRNewser.

—Alyssa

Scott Malish addresses one of the issues we’ve been discussing a lot lately in FirstWord Digital: how to most accurately measure the ROI of our online PR campaigns.

PR pros must live and breathe social media and think up new, unique ways to use it for clients. But at the same time, it is also up to us to be able to measure the impact those social media channels are having for clients.  And to go even further, it is time for the industry to push clients for their business data - whether it’s sales, web traffic, whatever - so that PR can measure the effectiveness of their work against it.  This will not only help improve levels of client service substantially, it will hold PR accountable. And by doing so, we will have the opportunity to become true business partners and not just a “nice to have” extension of marketing.

Especially in the online brands sphere, it is becoming more and more necessary to work with our clients’ back-end Web developers for access to traffic data and detailed analytics. As public relations professionals, it’s also our duty to educate our clients about the fact that ROI consists of more than just numbers. The wise Paull Young pointed me toward this article, which maintains that outcomes (the degree of success of your campaign) are more important than outputs (how many eyeballs saw it).

Hits, subscribers, friends and tags…measure dissemination, not change in opinion, impact or action. They measure outputs, not outcomes.

In an ideal world, we’d be able to judge our PR successes solely and subjectively on the positive influence it had on its audience. Yet pragmatic publicists know that for the vast majority of clients, numbers are still king. However, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work as hard as we can to change those attitudes.

—Alyssa

David Mullen wrote a cute public relations version of “The 12 Days of Christmas” for his blog, Communications Catalyst. Something to get you in the spirit on these last few days of work before the holidays!

On the first day of Christmas the PR gods gave to me a crisis at 7 p.m. on a Friday.

On the second day of Christmas the PR gods gave to me two embargoes broken.

On the third day of Christmas the PR gods gave to me three meetings by noon.

On the fourth day of Christmas the PR gods gave to me four four-hour conference calls.

On the fifth day of Christmas the PR gods gave to me five clients quoted out of context.

On the six day of Christmas the PR gods gave to me six new media lists needed.

On the seventh day of Christmas the PR gods gave to me seven interns who know everything.

On the eighth day of Christmas the PR gods gave to me eight “make a viral video” requests.

On the ninth day of Christmas the PR gods gave to me nine non-newsworthy “stories.”

On the tenth day of Christmas the PR gods gave to me ten 10 AP style edits.

On the eleventh day of Christmas the PR gods gave to me 11 holiday parties.

On the twelfth day of Christmas the PR gods gave to me 12 new product launches, 11 holiday parties, ten 10 AP style edits, nine non-newsworthy “stories,” eight “make a viral video” requests, seven interns who know everything, six new media lists needed, five clients quoted out of context, four four-hour conference calls, three meetings by noon, two embargoes broken and a crisis at 7 p.m. on a Friday.

-Alyssa

In case you haven’t heard yet, Michael Arrington declared war on the PR industry yesterday when he announced that TechCrunch will no longer be honoring embargoes.

We’ve never broken an embargo at TechCrunch. Not once. Today that ends. From now our new policy is to break every embargo. We’ll happily agree to whatever you ask of us, and then we’ll just do whatever we feel like right after that. We may break an embargo by one minute or three days. We’ll choose at random.

Some firms will stop talking to us (yeah! less email), but we’ll find other ways to get the news. Others, who haven’t read this post because they don’t read TechCrunch, will be unpleasantly surprised. Maybe if we cause enough pain then PR firms will start to take action against those publications who break the rules.

Although this happened yesterday, the blogosphere and Twittersphere is still abuzz about it.

—Alyssa

A new free service called MicroPR has been created by Brian Solis to allow journalists to post their story ideas and PR people to respond through Twitter.  The concept is drawing skeptics who believe that journalists will not want to share their upcoming story ideas on Twitter for the competition to see.

-Maria

Amazon.com has created a “Holiday Customer Review Team,” a group of six Amazon customers who love to write product reviews, and is offering the team to reporters as sources for holiday gift stories.

Although Amazon says the team members are “real people giving unbiased advice to fellow consumers” and “not employed by Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates,” they have received free products and complimentary airfare. However, each review of a free product is identified for transparency purposes.

—Alyssa

PR pros often forget who they are really trying to reach with their message. Perhaps today’s bottom-line approach has created a PR industry too focused on media that they have “elevated placements above the people we’re actually trying to reach.”

Over at PR blog Communications Catalyst, social media junkie David Mullen talks about how integrating social media into communications strategies should be about redefining the “P” in PR, renewing a focus on people, not the public and much less the media.

Do we pitch stories to outlets that don’t target our “people” for the sake of increasing impression numbers?

Do we send stuff out on newswires because you get some automatic online “placements” and “impressions” that real people could never find by searching the news site, even with perfect keywords? (We can only find them because we’re sent a direct link.)

…Media outlets are vehicles – tools, if you will – not the end goal. But I think the conversation needs to take an even bigger step back. In Yesteryear, we could get away with simply thinking about “publics.” I think, though, that might not cut it these days. Today, it’s all about People Relations.

- Danny