The Intersection of Online and Offline

I was so happy to be contacted yesterday by my once competitor, once colleague, and always friend, Cheryl Contee.  Cheryl is one of the smartest people out there in the social media space, and had worked out of the San Francisco office of a former employer.

I was overjoyed to find out that Cheryl, along with her business partner, Rosalyn “Roz” Lemieux, have founded Fission Strategy, a San Francisco-based consulting business:

“..specializing in online advocacy, marketing, and communications. Fission partners, Roz Lemieux and Cheryl Contee, have launched dozens of online campaigns, websites, and blogs. We have been using social media to help nonprofit organizations (and for-profits focused on “social good”) communicate since 2003, so we share with you tested techniques that work.”

Good things do indeed happen to good people, but more often than not, if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.   What makes me so happy is that Cheryl now has a place to literally call her own, in which she can apply her smarts, business acumen and wonderful personality.

I have told Cheryl in the past that we are parallel universe people for a variety of reasons, but I don’t care if you are a Democrat, Republican, black, white or striped - Cheryl is one smart cookie and I am delighted that she has her own gig.

Cheryl and Roz - I would wish you luck, but something tells me that you won’t need it.

Mark

I have been waiting for a post like this to comment on, but in PR Squared’s “Cut the PR Agency? Are You *Sure* About That?” — Todd Defren points out his first client casualty due to the economic uncertainly of the bad economy.  Todd writes:

It happened today.  The economic angst whacked our agency upside the head.  We now have our first example of a client who’s asked to terminate our contract “strictly as a precaution driven by economic uncertainty.”

It seems Sequoia Capital’s “Mandatory All-Hands CEO Meeting” last week, with its gloomy slide deck, has tech CEOs skittering for cover.  But folks who rely solely on the VCs’ slideshow to make crucial decisions do their companies a disservice: it seems there was a lot of other valuable conversation happening throughout the Sequoia event.

It goes without saying that if you are chasing dollars in the relations world right now — either internal or external — now is the time to really “sing for your supper” and proactively and consistently ensure that your value is evident to those who control your dollars, yen or scheckels.

Now I am not a CFO, nor can I really even balance my own checkbook, it it often seems that company bean counters take a dim view of public relations in a economic downturn.  Besides cutting back on internal communications, this is about the dumbest thing that you can do.

Todd sums it up pretty well:

“It is well documented that brands that increase (marketing) during a recession, when competitors are cutting back, can improve market share and return on investment at lower cost than during good economic times.”

This is a great, succinct argument, but as someone who worked on the agency side for many, many years (the first to be axed in a bad economy), one that often falls of deaf ears.

I’m curious to know others’ thoughts when it comes to the value of public relations in a economic downturn.  How do you establish and promote its value?

Mark

I am really going to make this post short, because most of it is contained in an article that I wrote today for Media Bullseye.

For those of you who have followed my trek through self-absorption (the Internet revolves around ME), to realization to a public apology, you may enjoy the article.

It also includes four tips (self-taught), focused on thinking carefully about the consequences of putting something in cyberspace before one hits the “publish” button.

Mark

I will make this post short and sweet, because sometimes, the less said, the better.  Today is International Blog Action Day 2008 and I am happy to be a part of it with my little blog.  This year’s topic is poverty.

Here comes the disclaimer: I live in a nice neighborhood, have two great, stable jobs and my life is pretty good.  But yesterday, I was talking with a colleague at work whose nine year-old daughter asked her parents last week if they wanted to keep her allowance for a while - not give it to her.  Strange thing for a nine year-old to ask.  Why?

It turns out that two of her classmates’ fathers has recently lost their jobs. Stories like this, from the protected cocoon in which I live, bring it home a) how fortunate I am, and b) not others share the same fortune.  I may complain about my 401(k) tanking, but at least I HAVE a 401(k).

My last note is that, as a dad with two young children, I focus intently on helping them understand how fortunate we really are.  That usually includes a trip to the basement for them to forage for un-played-with toys, put them in a box and take them to a local day-laborer site, the Casa de Maryland.  Last year was the first time that we tried this, and thinking through the minds of small children, I started with just one box and a request to “think hard” about the toys they didn’t want.

We ended up with four boxes of toys, a very grateful staff at the Casa de Maryland and one very proud father. We are fortunate, but not everyone is.

Mark

I’m doing a lot of thinking these days about measurement of the effectiveness of public relations programs.  We’re covering this in my class and my day job is, well, getting kicked around a bit of late.

I have long been a proponent of the premise that, in order to do good measurement, you need a “mashup” of tools.  You need to look at, of course, print, blogs, Web sites, message boards (especially in the world if finance), but measurement often lags behind the subject matter that it measures.

I’m coming late to the party, but ReadWriteWeb reported on the Twittermeter, a way to measure mentions in Twitter.  They state:

Enter Twittermeter. Twittermeter uses the Twitter API to scrape the site’s public feed and creates a database of every word sent over Twitter. Though database overages have forced the site to display only results for the past week, they have data since November 6th, 2007 totaling over 14.5 million words from 2.1 million status messages.

Twittermeter creates buzz graphs comparing words. For example, the graph below for the word “earthquake,” clearly shows a spike during the UK quake that took place earlier this week.”

Cool.  The challenge, for communicators, is now to add that to one big tent.  I am an unabashed fan of Custom Scoop, a platform that, while collecting information for thousands of print sites and blogs, also offers one of the opportunity to accept .xml feeds from other sites.  The more that you can measure under one big tent, the better. Tweetscan (or Twitter Search, whichever you call it) can also do it.

And while I am at it, measurement should not be about the tone or favorability ot articles, but of mentions of the company or issue that you are tracking.  Thanks to Katie Payne, I am now a disciple of “Measuring Public Relationships.”

Mark