Posting, Pitching and PR: The Presentation (#TalkIsCheap)

Last week, I gave a presentation at Centennial College's Talk Is Cheap unconference. The talk was Music Blogging: Posting, Pitching and PR, and if that sounds familiar, its because I wrote a blog post with the same title a few months ago. I've gone to #TalkIsCheap for the past few years, and I've always had a great time. I think it's one of the better social media events in Toronto these days, and the organizers deserve a round of applause. (Thanks for letting me speak!)

The gist of my talk was that as much as I enjoy writing the occasional post here on BlogCampaigning, I don't really like writing about PR, and I don't like reading about PR and and communications. By the informal polls I did of the audience, it seems like most people agreed with me. (I mean, c'mon: do you REALLY enjoy reading about PR and communications?)

I went on to talk about how much more I enjoyed writing about electronic music and science fiction for my other blog, and how doing that has taught me way more about PR and online communications than writing posts for BlogCampaigning.

While I didn't get too deep into the details of music blogging, I did talk about some of things I'd learned about PR from my other blog:

1. Your pitches don't have to be personalized – I feel like PR and communications pros who blog are the only ones who insist on pitches being personalized. The rest of the blogging world will post about something if they feel its relevant to their audience. Personalized pitches can help, but they aren't necessary.

2. Your pitches should be well targeted – if they aren't, you're just wasting everyone's time. When talking about this, I used an example of a PR person that sent me an album to review for my music blog. I normally only blog about electronic music, but the album was folk guitar. I'm going to ignore every e-mail I get from that PR person from now on, because I'll just assume it is the same type of music.

3. Don't send fancy HTML emails - once again, you're wasting everyone's time. They don't show up well on mobile devices, Outlook frequently blocks the images and even Yahoo! and Gmail don't seem to like them.

4. Don't follow up – it just pisses people off. While admittedly I've gotten some great coverage out of following up with a journalist, and have also posted something just because some guy followed up so often that I started to feel guilty, nobody feels good about a PR pitch being followed up. It's one of those things that everyone just feels awkward about. In the case where you have a good relationship with a journalist or a blogger, then its probably alright to follow up because you'll know when it is appropriate. As someone else commented during my presentation, if you're pitches are well targeted then you probably shouldn't have to do a lot of follow-up.

In the end, I tried to encourage the audience to start a blog about something they care about. For example, if they want to work in PR for one of the big car companies, they should start a blog about cars. If they want to work in fashion PR, they should start a fashion blog. Seeing the world in the eyes of an online journalist will be far more valuable than writing the occasional post about something like the "intersection of PR and social media".

So what do you think—should students blog about their thoughts on the PR industry, or should they be blogging about something they care about?

Have you started a blog, and given up after a while because it was about something you weren't interested in?

-Parker

Everything I Need To Know About Social Media I learned From The Globe and Mail

A few days ago, I gave a presentation as part of the Canadian Institute's Managing Social Media conference here in beautiful, downtown Toronto.

As often happens with these things, I agreed to participate in the conference months ago, and I'm not even sure how I arrived at the title of "Integrating Social Media With Traditional Media" for my talk.

As I began to put my slides together, I realized that I'd need some solid examples of organizations that had successfully "integrated social media with traditional media".

The one that kept coming up was The Globe and Mail, and I think that communicators can learn a lot from the way this organization, which used to be a traditional, print newspaper, has morphed into combination of newspaper and social media portal at TheGlobeAndMail.com.

The main lessons that I think we can learn from them are below:

1.) Make it easy for people to get the information they want in the format they prefer: By this, I mean offer your content across different channels and in different places. The Globe and Mail has a print edition that I can buy at the newsstand, I can download a PDF version from their site, I can subscribe to their news via RSS, or I can read the actual stories on their website. The point is that I can access it in the way that I want.

2.) Embrace multimedia: The Globe and Mail is a newspaper, yet they use audio content in various sections on their site, and they also frequently embed video in their articles. This is similar to point one in that it offers the information in other formats.

3.) Easy URLs: Social media is about sharing. Make it easy for people to share your information (or access it in the first place) by giving them easy URLs. The example I use in my presentation is how The Globe and Mail has done this by telling readers of their print edition that they can access more information about the Toronto International Film Festival at globeandmail.com/tiff09. Its easy to share, its easy to remember and both of those mean that there is a greater chance that people will view it and give it to others to check out.

4.) Do It Live: The Globe and Mail used to print a paper edition once a day (they might have also had an evening edition or something), as most papers did. However, they constantly update their website. They also frequently hold live chats with reporters and cover events live using tools like Cover It Live. Communicators can adapt this kind of strategy by holding press conferences online, or making their spokespersons available for online discussions.

5.) Keyword-rich, easy-to-understand headlines: Admittedly, this isn't something I learned from The Globe and Mail, but another source. (Props to my friend Michael Allison for pointing this out to me!)

6.) Be part of the community: Inspired by a quote I heard attributed to Mathew Ingram, that "Linking to other sources and reading comments makes journalists stronger", I suggest that the lesson for communicators is to get involved in the community they are trying to reach. Their messages will be more relevant, and chances are the community will be more likely to accept the messages if they come from a trusted member.

7.) Keep it fresh: The reason people read the newspaper everyday is because it has new information everyday. Stories have updates. The take-away from this is that once a story goes live, you don't have to forget about it. Follow up on it, provide more information, and keep the story alive in the public eye with a new angle.

8.) Try new things: As I said in a post earlier this week, stop thinking about best practices and case studies and just go out there and do something new and interesting. The Globe and Mail is undergoing all sorts of change, and I'm sure they are the first ones to try some of the things they're doing. Let's learn from that.

I've embedded the slide show below. Since I'm as much of a student of the Masnickian school of Powerpoint presentations as I am his thoughts on economics, the deck has 103 slides that I covered in just under 40 minutes.

Integrating Social Media With Traditional Media

You can also download it at ParkerMason.ca/globe. Thanks to the Canadian Institute for giving me the chance to speak and to everyone in the audience for listening.

And special thanks to Joe Thornley for preserving on his blog what the Twitter community said online during my presentation. Credit for the photo above also goes to Joe.

-Parker

Public Speaking Tips

I am by no means an expert at public speaking, but over the past few years I've found myself in front of an audience more and more often. Some times I've excelled, sometimes I've bombed, but I've managed to learn a few things along the way. Eat before your presentation Especially if it is a presentation centered around a meal, like a "lunch and learn" or if you are the speaker at a dinner. Normally, you'll be scheduled to speak at around the same time others are eating. Even if is a casual setting and you'll be dining with your audience, you don't want to look like a glutton. Your audience is there to hear what you have to tell them, not watch you eat.

Eating beforehand also ensures that you don't spill anything on your shirt.

More water, less coffee Coffee gives me the jitters, and I tend to speak too quickly and excitedly. Water keeps me hydrated and my mouth moist so that I can keep on talking.

Know Your Material Your audience will be able to smell bullshit more easily than fear. If you don't know your material very well, then you shouldn't be speaking about it. If you understand your material well enough, no amount of distraction, nerves or difficult questions will throw you off.

Engage your audience Look them in the eye, ask them questions, make them feel like they are part of a conversation rather than being lectured at. Look around at different people in the crowd (rather than at the back wall, as I used to do) gives you a better idea about who is paying attention and who isn't so that you can measure the level of information getting across. If all you see are glazed eyes and people praying into their Blackberries, you need to be doing something different to get their attention.

Make sure your fly isn't open and that your shirt isn't tucked into your underpants Seriously. It takes two seconds to check. (Hilarious anecdote related to this tip available upon request.)

Any other advice?

-Parker

Ottawa Wrap-Up, Conference Follow-up

Wow...what a week in Ottawa. Last Tuesday, I spent my morning having a Social Media Breakfast at Overlay.TV and hearing Fat Canary's Ryan Anderson give a great, quick talk on Reputation 2.0 (thanks for having me out, even though I signed up late).

I think that the breakfast format is a great way to do these things, and I look forward to helping Joe Thornley get them off the ground here in Toronto. As much as I love having a beer and chatting with people after work, I also love going home at the end of the day and would much rather wake up early with a cup of a coffee, some breakfast and an inspiring talk.

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On Wednesday and Thursday, I participated in the Advanced Learning Institute's Social Media For Government Conference. Joe Thornley did a great job of making people feel guilty for not using Twitter, and I think there were more than just a few who felt his heat and signed up on the spot.

In fact, Twitter was huge at this conference. In addition to the rookies, there were a number of vets that helped keep the Twitter conversation going. While others were speaking, I found a lot of value in having side conversations with others in the room who I only knew via Twitter.

(For those of you new to Twitter, Mark Goren has two great blog posts about how to get started (part one, part two) and I'd also recomend a post I wrote a few weeks ago)

On Thursday morning while I was giving my presentation about Social Media Releases I was also pleased to learn that the Twitter conversation continued on. I also felt pretty pleased with the fact that #ALI was the sixth most popular trending topic during my presentation, according to Search.Twitter.com. As a speaker, it provided me with great feedback about my presention.

It also gives me a chance to follow up with some of the questions or concerns that the audience had at the time.

"Distribution of social media releases is the elephant in the room because wire services can't send out social media releases" tweeted one audience member. While it is true that the actual newswire can't distribute social media releases over the wire due to limitations of the technology on the side of the major media points, newswires like CNW have gotten around this by issuing an SMR advisory over the wire, and by distributing the actual Social Media Release via Twitter and RSS.

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I also had a great time at the CPRS Ottawa season kick-off event last Thursday, hanging out with the CNW Group Ottawa Bureau crew and other CPRS members in Capital City (and CPRS Toronto has a lot to learn from CPRS Ottawa, particularly in how their websites are designed and updated...more on this later).

It was a busy week, and I didn't have time for blogging but I've got what I think will be a couple of kick-ass posts brewing up.

If you are reading this because I met you in Ottawa, thanks for checking out BlogCampaigning! You can subscribe via the orange button on the right hand side of this page. Feel free to get in touch with me via Twitter, email (parker (at) blogcampaigning (dot) com) or by commenting here on the blog.

-Parker