First I read that the AP has suspended the use of photos from the Department of Defense, and then later in the weekend my roommate sends me an article saying that Victoria’s Secret model Karolina Kurkova doesn’t have a belly button, and that they insert it digitally in any midriff-baring pictues of her.

Why is one use of a doctored photo acceptable, while the other results in outrage from a news agency?

Unlike the Iranian missile situation from this summer, neither photo was edited in an attempt to change the news or what it was reporting.

The line at which is acceptable to edit photos has been blurring for a long time. At what point will we stop caring?

-Parker

The first office job I had was in Australia for a software company, and things were pretty casual around there. Most days I showed up straight from a dawn patrol session at Currumbin, and was still wearing my boardshorts with a t-shirt and Havis. Wearing a collared golf or polo shirt was getting dressed up. Wearing a button down shirt meant you were crazy.

Things at my current job  are a little different, and in the past year and half of being a “real guy,” I’ve learned a lot about what it takes to be prepared in the office.

When I first started at my current company, I was the go-to guy for events. Some weeks, I was going to an event almost every single night and had some early-morning breakfast events thrown in there as well. The life of an awards ceremony-attendee was glamorous, but also taxing. To stay my sharpest, I started keeping a kit at work.

It included:

A complete change of clothes

I don’t mean just a spare shirt here - I mean a entire outfit. When you’ve been at a breakfast at 6am, had meetings all day, and then had to go out for dinner that night you’ll be glad that you had a clean white shirt to change into. Keeping a sports coat or suit jacket around is always a good idea, because you’ll want to look your best if you get called into a last-minute meeting. Same goes for having an extra tie or two around the office.

Even if you don’t think you’ll need a more formal outfit for going out for dinner or to an important meeting, its still a good idea to keep a change at the office. A few weeks ago I was having lunch with a friend when she spilled her coffee all over the front of my shirt and pants. Had I not been prepared, it would have been a long afternoon.

Toiletries

When I was teaching English in Japan, I realized that all of the teachers at the Junior High School I worked at brushed their teeth after lunch. So did all of the kids, and after a few days of feeling like a dirty foreigner I too started bringing my toothbrush to work. To the delight of my dentist, this is a habit I’ve kept up. I also keep deodorant (both a stick of my preferred brand Speed Stick and a can of spray-on Axe for when I need that extra effect); a razor and shaving cream; and hair gel.

Cash

One of the things that my dad taught me is that you should always carry a bit of cash. You never know when you’ll forget your lunch, have to pay for a taxi or want to buy a cute girl a drink. Even in this day and age, not everyone takes debit or credit cards (and bank machines are always broken when you need them), so its always a good idea to have a little bit of money hidden at your desk for when you need it.

This might all sound like overkill, but it is way better to have this stuff and never need to use it than to not have it and wish you did.

What goes in your office kit?

-Parker

I recently wrote a post on this blog introducing you to Jan Chipchase’s Future Perfect blog in an attempt to introduce people to some blogs that might be outside their usual reading scope. Continuing with this series is a post about SEOMoz and why you should be reading it.

A concept that has been around for a long time in the web industry but only recently seems to be gaining steam amongst communications professionals is that of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). According to Wikipedia, this is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site via natural or “organic” search results. Basically, the more optimized your website is, the better traffic you’ll get to it.

For some reason, many of the people that I have spoken to in the past few months seem to think that there is some sort of alchemical magic or technological wizardry that optimizes a site for search engines.

Put aside those thoughts and start reading the SEOMoz blog, written by some of the world’s leading SEO experts. Some of their posts are directed at newcomers to the world of SEO and can offer a great introduction. Others are a little more complicated and technical, and the balance of the two types of posts lets you pick up anywhere and start learning or applying what you already know.

If you’re more of a visual learner, they also have a series of posts called Whiteboard Fridays where one of their team members will create a short, casual video explaining some SEO concepts.

One of my favorite posts on SEOMoz is about the Three Cornerstones of SEO. Even though it was published back in mid-September, I’m constantly referring to the great diagram they have that makes it easy to explain the basic concepts of Search Engine Optimization.

So head on over to SEOMoz and find out why can proudly say they’ve got more than 30,000 subscribers to their RSS feed.

-Parker

PS: Related is a great post from Ed Lee about why your site sucks in search engine rankings. As I commented there:

“I also think that too many people complicate SEO, particularly in our industry. They think that it is some kind of alchemical magic, when it really comes down to the three simple “pillars” that you mention. I’ve always heard that if you design a site that is easy to navigate by humans, the search engine bots/spiders will also be able to crawl it easily and find your content. If you’re creating relevant content and writing naturally using words that people are likely to search for rather than jargon, people will be able to find your site and are more likely to get something out of it, and subsequently link to it.”

Over the past few months, I’ve given a lot of thought to Social Media Releases. They are a great tool, but only if used correctly. In the few years that they’ve been out, there have been a lot of different types and styles, successes and failures, but no real agreed-upon strategy for how to use them.

I think it is time we should start thinking about how exactly to use them, and less about the actual form they should take. My recommended strategy for a course of action when including a Social Media Release in a communications campaign includes four points: Monitoring, Message, Media, and Media Relations.
1.) Monitoring: Paying attention to what is being said about your brand or organization has always been recommended as a first step. As has been said before, social media is a conversation. Just as you would wait until your turn to speak in a real-world conversation, and then say something relevant, you should do the same in an online conversation. Monitoring will help you ensure the timing, nature and relevancy of your message.

2.) Message: This is what the core of the release is. It is why you are making an announcement. It is what you are hoping your audience of bloggers and the online community will care about enough to engage with. As April Dunford recently wrote in the blog post entitled “A Skeptic’s Guide TO Social Media Press Releases“:

“You need to answer the question “Why is this interesting right now?”  What is it about your announcement that makes it important information to share right now?  If you can make your news relevant to a broader audience than experts in your space, you are well on your way to spectacularness.”

If you can’t think of a reason why your announcement would be interesting to anyone, you’re probably not going to get a lot of media attention.

3.) Media: One of the coolest things about a Social Media Release is that you can include photos, audio and video to accompany the text of the release. However, this doesn’t mean that  a JPEG of the CEO’s head and a television commerical uploaded to YouTube constitute great multimedia content. Instead, you should think about your target audience and what might appeal to them. If it is a product launch, including images of the product in use and with a plain, white background would probably be beneficial to bloggers that might use them. Similarly, including a short video of the product in use might do wonders (but keep it short).

My thought is that a Social Media Release should provide value to the intended audience. The text portion should provide value in that it is informing them about something new. The accompanying media should either reinforce this value, or provide value on their own. One of the reasons I believe that the video CNW Group produced with Mark McKay got picked up online (here and here, for starters) is because it provided educational value by teaching people what a Social Media Release was. Similarly, April Dunford mentions in her post that she also provided a white-paper that showed other companies how they could start a green program in their organization.

4.) Media Relations: Contacting journalists has always been a part of traditional public relations, and it should continue to be a part of public relations in the blogging age.  Just because the audience you are trying to reach is online and you might never see them in real life does not mean that you can simply blast them with email. In fact, a huge part of the Social Media Release is the social aspect, and the fact that it is able to connect you and your news with so many people. Research and follow blogs that are relevant to your news - just as you might have different traditional media contacts for different types of news, you will probably want to reach out to different bloggers as well.

5.) Monitoring: As with any communications plan, monitoring success and following up where necessary are an important part. In the case of a campaign involving a  Social Media Release, monitoring should include not just checking to see where it got picked up and how it was used. I included Monitoring as both first and last on the list because it marks the beginning of a new communications cycle.
I hardly think that the Social Media Release is the only tool for communicators to reach an online audience, but I do think it is a good one. If you have any thoughts, suggestions or criticisms of my “4M Theory” I’d be happy to hear them.

-Parker

(As with all of my posts on BlogCampaigning, this reflects my own personal thoughts and opinions. These may not necessarily be the same as those held by my employer, CNW Group).

Since yesterday was “Take Your Kid To Work Day,” there were a number of 14 year-old students hanging out in our offices. I don’t know if it was because I am closer to their age than some of my other coworkers, but I was asked to spend an hour talking about social media with them.

Of the five, four had accounts on Facebook. Of those four, one of them had not checked it in about a year, two of them checked their’s once per week and the other checked daily. Interestingly enough, the one fellow that didn’t have a Facebook account had a far better understanding of how the internet works than the others - he used Torrents all the time, and was the only one to use and customize Firefox.

None of them had MySpace accounts. None of them had ever emailed a YouTube video to a friend, but they had all sent videos to friends using MSN Messenger. Messenger also seemed to be something they spent a lot of time on - rather than browsing the web, they were just talking to the same people they talk to at school (the instant messaging feature of Facebook was totally lost on them - none of them used it or really knew how it worked).

Napster was like a myth to them - when I asked them about it, one of them said “Didn’t that used to be a company or something?” and they were in disbelief when I said it would sometimes take days to download a song.

Near the end of our time together, I asked them about cell phones. Their eyes lit up at this, and they all pulled out their phones. They told me that they text each other regularly, and only one of them seemed to get the distinction between regularly spelled words and phrases and the ‘txting’ short-hand that is often used in text messages. They also thought it was crazy that I didn’t have a cell phone until I was 24 and moved to Japan. (”Is that because your parents wouldn’t pay for it?” one of them asked me).

None of them new what they wanted to be when they grow up, and I said that was fine - they were only 15. Any jobs that they think they might want now will have drastically changed by the time they graudate university and start a career. The good part is that there will be a whole bunch of new jobs that don’t exist right now, or that we aren’t even really aware of that will be perfect for these kids.

Another thing that I thought was interesting was that they didn’t have the enormous media diets that I thought they would. When I asked what websites they normally visited, they told me that they normally just visited the websites of the companies that they liked (mostly video game companies) to check for new products. They aren’t reading blogs, and they aren’t using search engines as much as you might think they might.

I’ll admit that five is hardly a representative sample, but it was still great talking to these kids and finding out what they thought of new technology. I hope that they were able to learn as much from me as I was from them.

Thanks also to everyone that chimed in on Twitter as I was explaining that to them - I think they understood, but I don’t think they thought Twitter was very cool. In a few years time, they’ll probably be hooked into something way better.

-Parker

PS: These kids also referred to Mario Kart 64 as “the original Mario Kart.”

Well, I’ve been tagged by Sharon in a great little meme first thrown out there by Collin Douma.

The game is two come up with 5 great examples of social media use that our peers might not have noticed.

The rules are something like this:

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules.
2. List five Social Media projects that deserve better exposure.
3. Tag EIGHT {as many as you’d like} “Social Media / Digital Experts” at the end of your post and list their names.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.
5. Tag your post “Five Gems” so we can search for all of these great examples.

I’m also going to go ahead an tack on what I think should be a 6th, rule, and that is that we should all tag our posts (and examples) as 5gems on Delicious so that they are easy to find later.

1. The CNW Group Social Media release announcing the CNW Group Social Media Release - Although a bit self-referrential, I think that this is an excellent case study in how a Social Media Release can be effectively used. People left comments, bloggers embedded the video on their site (due to it being educational, rather than advertorial in nature) and one site even used the CNW logo provided with the release. (disclosure: I work for CNW, and worked directly on this).

2. Journalist Source -While they aren’t using social media directly besides having their homepage built on Wordpress and using a Twitter account, they are providing a great service to writers (I’m thinking bloggers here) that might not necessairly have the kind of resources needed to research a story on their own and source experts.

3. MySpace - Look, I know that a lot of people don’t care about MySpace anymore because it is just full of retina-burning designs and emo kids. But ever since I started a music blog a few months ago, I’ve been all over MySpace. It’s where the cool stuff happens: the creative kids are on MySpace, designinging their own pages, seeing what they can do within the constraints of the site and promoting themselves. The boring kids are on Facebook, installing applications and de-tagging drunken photos of themselves.

4. I Like Totally Love It -My Blogcampaigning co-author Jens told me about this site a little while ago, and it is definitely worth checking out. I don’t really know how to describe it, but they are kind of a social-voting site for products and things that you want, or I guess, things that you, like, totally love.

5. Movember - Growing moustaches for charity…what a great idea, and they’ve really used the online space to build traction for this. I participated last year, but I can already tell that it has grown alot since then. (if anyone is doing it this year, let me know and I’ll sponsor you!).

I’m tagging Chris Clarke, Martin Waxman, Jessica Ayers, Michael Allison and Alecia O’Brien.

-Parker

Magazines and newspapers are cutting staff. Ebook readers grow in popularity and functionality. Environmental concerns begin to outweigh the need to print out such disposable items like magazines and newspapers.

There isn’t really much of a future for the print industry, is there?

Actually, I think there is. And while I think that the discussion about what newspapers will evolve into is certainly worth having (I personally think that they will come to resemble blogs more and more just as the top blogs will come to resemble newspaper website, blurring the line), I’m not going to get into it now.

Instead I’m going to talk about magazines.

I love reading magazines and I buy them all the time. My preferred publications are normally surfing magazines, but I also buy RADAR if it looks like an interesting issue. Since my roommate subscribes to Toronto Life, I’ll often read that (along with Fashion, the magazine that accompanies it). When the mood strikes us, we’ll also sometimes pick up Vanity Fair. I’ve even seen a few copies of GQ lying around my other roommate’s room but he doesn’t seem to read them when I’m around.

The point is that there is still a market for these. People like the tangible feel of a magazine. “I love magazines,” writes Alana Taylor, lamenting the discontinuation of one of her favorite magazines. “I still would like to write for one and I still enjoy buying & reading them and I still love ripping out pictures to create collages on my bedroom wall.”

I’ve heard people remark before that the reason newspapers have failed to adapt to the internet era is similiar to the way the horse and buggy industry failed to adapt to the era of the motorcar and steam train. Rather than seeing themselves in the transportation business, the horse and buggy industry saw themselves as being what was an increasingly unfashionable horse and buggy business. Similarly, newspapers saw themselves as being in the newsaper business (rooted in paper publications), rather than in the news gathering and distribution business.

I think it is interesting that a few people have used similiarly equine analogies to describe the magazine industry. Former Conde Nast editor James Truman likens magazines to horses in that they used to be something that everyone could afford and that were enjoyed and used by the masses and are now increasingly becoming a luxury item. Along the same lines,  Howard Junker, editor of ZYZZYVA apparently compared magazines to ponies in that they don’t serve any real purpose but people keep them around because they like to look at them.

Truman thinks that the direction the magazine industry will take is to offer even more luxurious, glossy and otherwise tactile objects of luxury such as those created by fashion icons like Karl Lagerfeld (”a ninja” as Truman refers to him).
As a firm believer in the idea that science-fiction often provides a prescient glimpse as to what our future might hold, I think it is worthwhile taking a look at the book Grey by Jon Armstrong. In it, the main character continues to buy magazines despite the fact that he lives in a futuristic, connected world extrapolated a few years down the road from our own.

This model doesn’t apply only to fashion magazines -
I recently bought a $15 magazine about Metal Gear Solid 4 because it offered such great art and compelling articles. When I lived in Australia, I used to buy a magazine called Monster Children. This skate and surf mag was printed in a unique format (length-wise, so that the spine was on the shorter side) on high-quality paper and always had amazing photos and graphic design. In fact, their team must have had high standards when it came to accepting advertisements because all of them were also beautiful from an art perspective.

The magazines’ websites then become promotional material for the actual publications. Pages and pages of advertising might become a thing of the past as companies either create their own publications or work more directly with the writers and editors to see their product or service featured, perhaps going as far as to sponsor certain sections. I’d see no problem with this, as magazines have always been a vehicle for delivering advertisements.

Do you still read magazines? Which direction do you think the industry will go in?

-Parker Mason

A few weeks ago there was an excellent article in the Globe and Mail called “The Class of 2012: Mr. Google’s Children” that followed a group of students in Toronto as they moved towards their high-school graduation last spring to where they are now (I’d link to it, but you know the way that newspaper and I feel about each other).

One of the quotes from the article that stuck with me was from Julien Hernandez who said:

“I’m learning to play the guitar right now off of YouTube. I can look up anything and in a few minutes know more about any subject than my teacher does. Why should I listen to them?”

Similarly, The Wired Campus reports that students who are listening to recorded university and college lectures online are speeding them up so that they can get through the material faster (found via Smart Mobs).

While I chose to major in English at University, I could have majored in anything and written my papers on anything. What matters was that I was learning to write and think critically.I also learned how to absorb new information, and use it accordingly.

I like to think that Julian Hernandez and the students fast-forwarding through lectures are ahead of the game, in that they have learned to learn more efficiently. I also hope that the teachers of today are teaching students to not just go to Google for answers, but to actually think about what those answers are and question them.

Someone once suggested having a student (of almost any age) unofficially monitor and look after a Wikipedia page. Not only will they learn about the way people interact and create content online, but they’ll learn about a specific subject area and will learn to research information that has been added to the page and ensure that it is correct.

-Parker

Next week I’m going to be giving a presentation to a group of PR students.

Besides telling them about Canada’s favorite newswire, I thought I’d also give them a bit of advice.

As I mentioned earlier, Julie Ruscioelli Rusciolelli* recomends that they include some of their interests on their resume, so I’ll probably tell them about that.

I also plan on telling them that they should get involved in social media - its a great way to start learning about PR and a great way to start interacting with the people that will eventually be their peers (and potential employers).

Can you think of anything else I should tell them?

*UPDATE: Also make sure you check your spelling.

I was going to write a full-on blog post this afternoon, but I think I got too much sun today so I’m going to leave you with a couple of other posts I think you should read:

-David Meerman Scott has a great post about personal branding and Twitter - it was so great that I shared it with some of my coworkers, then immediately realized that my own Twitter page isn’t exactly up to par (I’m working on it!).

-io9 makes the point that web-series are the new direct-to-dvd. The example that they use is for a series called The Artifact that is being offered on YouTube and on the show’s website. I think that’s just a great way to repackage something, and it will actually make me (a guy that doesn’t have a tv at home) more likely to watch it.

-Our favorite PR Maven has some good advice for young job-seekers (in the field of PR or not): don’t skip the “interests” section on your resume. This is your chance to stand out.

Until next time…

-Parker Mason