Inside PR and PRSA present: 2012 Best of Silver Anvil Awards Winner

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Inside PR and PRSA present a special interview with the 2012 Best of Silver Anvil award winner: IBM’s ‘Centennial Celebration of Public Service’ featuring Lisa Lanspery, manager of Corporate Communications, IBM and Esty Pujadas, partner and director of the Global Technology Practice at Ketchum.

Last year IBM turned 100, a rare milestone for a technology company, and the organization wanted to mark the occasion with a year of celebrations. Looking to their values and heritage for inspiration, they created a comprehensive corporate social responsibility program that focused on activating and engaging employees to share their skills in projects around the world.

IBM has over 400,000 employees globally and all were encouraged to contribute at least eight hours of their time.  The corporate communications team and Ketchum developed an integrated communications strategy inviting staff to give back through active participation in hyper-local programs that provided a direct benefit to the communities involved.  And they wanted to provide a platform that enabled staff to share stories and visuals about the positive impact their work produced.

Central to the program was a digital map of the world showcasing the various activities. The employees’ stories offered a glimpse into their dedication and the breadth of the volunteerism whether it was engineering and computer projects or personal donations of time. What made it stand out was the human element – how the company empowered employees to help.

For its anniversary, IBM wanted to make a difference its staff’s efforts and their results were impressive: 80 per cent of IBMs work force volunteered on programs in 120 countries and touched the lives of 10 million people.

And it was captured and amplified via social sharing and traditional media, with a message to spread the word to others to volunteer.

It’s an innovative and inspiring initiative and we want to congratulate IBM and Ketchum on their honor. And the volunteerism from within IBM continues.

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Send us an email or an audio comment to [email protected], join the Inside PR Facebook group, leave us a comment here, message us @inside_pr on Twitter, or connect with Gini Dietrich, Joe Thornley, and Martin Waxman on Twitter.

Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer.

This week’s episode was produced by Kristine Simpson.

Inside PR and PRSA present: Silver Anvil Awards Finalists – Part 2

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This week, Inside PR and PRSA present the second of two special episodes featuring Martin’s interviews with Silver Anvil Awards finalists.

Adrienne Hayes is the general manager of consumer marketing at Edelman in New York. She led the team on its campaign for Church and Dwight called ‘Trojan Pulls Back the Sheets on Sexy Tech’.

Focusing their strategy on making the subject matter more approachable, they leveraged ‘adjacency categories’, that is industries that were also known for product breakthroughs.  They decided to treat the new Trojan products as cool ‘tech gadgets’ and launch them at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. And while some media were red-faced when presented with the story, they quickly understood the tie in; it appealed to media who wanted something new and fresh to write about.

They continued their creative approach during the second part of the year when they took the show on the road and launched the ‘Good Vibrations Truck Tour’ around Manhattan to give people an opportunity to ‘see, touch and feel’ the different products. They used social media to drive awareness of where the trucks would be and encouraged consumers to talk openly about what has traditionally been a taboo subject.

Doug Piwinski, senior vice president of marketing and communications at Toms, tells us about the company’s ‘One Day Without Shoes’ initiative, which began as an April Fool’s gag and developed into a global campaign. Tom’s is unique as a business because they don’t rely on traditional advertising and instead build relationships with customers through social media and word of mouth. Each year the company activates its community by asking them to give up wearing shoes for one day in order to experience what life is like for children who don’t have shoes.

The program comes to life through a series of grassroots events in cities around the world and is promoted via a microsite which encourages people to plan and post events.

They worked with Ketchum PR in LA to craft a phased strategy and weren’t expecting the snowball effect that took place this year including stories on the home page of AOL and MSN and becoming number one trending topic on Twitter.  Toms effectively uses an influencer strategy to inspire people to engage, raise awareness for an important cause and think about social entrepreneurship in a new way.

This year’s Silver Anvil awards will be presented in New York City on June 7, 2012. Inside PR will be there.

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Send us an email or an audio comment to [email protected], join the Inside PR Facebook group, leave us a comment here, message us @inside_pr on Twitter, or connect with Gini Dietrich, Joe Thornley, and Martin Waxman on Twitter.

Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer.

This week’s episode was produced by Kristine Simpson.

Inside PR and PRSA present: Silver Anvil Awards Finalists – Part 1

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This week, Inside PR and PRSA present a special show where Martin interviews two Silver Anvil Awards finalists.

Scott Brooks is vice president, marketing and communications for IBM Research. He talks to us about Watson, the computer-contestant on Jeopardy that defeated two of the show’s best players. Watson’s technology is based on the concept of  ‘automatic question answering’.  A team of 25 people worked for years to improve the ability of computers to answer questions.  When the communications folks saw the initial results, they realized the PR potential to build awareness and contacted Jeopardy to see if they might be interested in a man-machine competition.

Getting an early start and narrowly targeting their prelaunch outreach was one of the strategies the communications group used  to tell the complex story in long form. About 18 months before the matches, they approached three media influencers, New York Times magazine to write a feature, PBS TV’s Nova to produce a documentary, and author Stephen Baker to write a book.  The three had open access to Watson throughout its development.

The biggest communications risk IBM faced was presenting Watson live on television and not knowing what the outcome would be. Brooks said they made big decisions early on that were game changers including what to name the computer, what kind of voice it would have and what it would look like on stage.  Watson was actually named for for first president of IBM.

Their strategy paid off and Watson garnered prelaunch awareness and much traditional and social media coverage during the matches and after the win.

Kari Mather works as a senior communications consultant in corporate communications at Allstate Insurance Company. (Disclosure Allstate Canada is a Thornley Fallis client though we don’t work with Allstate U.S.)

The company created the Allstate Foundation, a not-for-profit organization, to fund cause-related programs in support of safe and vital communities, safe driving and ending domestic violence.

In this case, they helped the community of Tuscon Arizona build a playground in honor of Christina-Taylor Green, the young girl born on 9/11, who, along with 10 others sadly lost their lives during the shooting that injured Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Not long after the tragedy, the Allstate Foundation learned the community wanted to commemorate Christina’s short life, stepped forward and granted funding to build a playground at Christina’s elementary school and ensuring her classmates were involved throughout the project.

In addition to the funds, Allstate Foundation was active throughout the design and build, brought in more than 100 volunteers and stood side by side with the community to help bring the Christina-Taylor Green Little Hands playground to life.

What could have been a local story was picked up by local and national media and it became an important milestone in the company’s history as they were able to involve the community, agencies and employees in a cause they really believed in.

This year’s Silver Anvil awards will be presented in New York City on June 7, 2012. Inside PR will be there.

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Send us an email or an audio comment to [email protected], join the Inside PR Facebook group, leave us a comment here, message us @inside_pr on Twitter, or connect with Gini Dietrich, Joe Thornley, and Martin Waxman on Twitter.

Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer.

This week’s episode was produced by Kristine Simpson.

Inside PR 2.97: Jazzing it up with Counselors Academy

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This week, Gini, Joe and I are all together at PRSA Counselors Academy’s annual conference for agency owners/leaders in New Orleans (and we all had our parts to play…). The theme is ‘Jazz Up Your Agency: Stylings from the Best in the Biz’ and we thought we’d recap our first day and a half.

Joe talks about the opening keynote – a one-two punch featuring Gini and Jay Baer. They interviewed each other and offered a primer in content marketing and how agency owners can build trust and their businesses by integrating certain aspects of their personal and professional lives. We may think otherwise, but we get clients based on people and not the company name.

In addition to an engaging talk, the attendees all received a copy of Gini and Geoff Livingston’s new book, Marketing in the Round.

We continued our focus on content marketing with our second keynote, Marcus Sheridan, a hilarious, in your face presenter, who transformed his pool business into a content marketing powerhouse that used the long tail of search to generate sales results. His takeaway is to think about all the questions your customers are asking and write content that offers helpful answers.

As an event geared to business owners,  Counselors’ other focus is to provide practical sessions that improve the way you run your agency. These range from profitability and processes to understanding and managing people and creating a culture. Joe did a roundtable on how to get your staff thinking about the business of the business and turning them into an army of entrepreneurs, based on Jen Prozek’s book and her 2011 keynote.

Next year, the conference will be in June 2013 in Austin Texas and Dana Hughens is the chair.  If you’re an agency owner or leader, we think you’ll find a lot of value and encourage you to check it out.  In the meantime, you can get a flavor of Counselors Academy from the Sharypic photowall.

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Send us an email or an audio comment to [email protected], join the Inside PR Facebook group, leave us a comment here, message us @inside_pr on Twitter, or connect with Gini Dietrich, Joe Thornley, and Martin Waxman on Twitter.

Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer.

This week’s episode was produced by Kristine Simpson.

Inside PR 2.94: Matthias Lufkens on Davos and social media

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This week we feature an interview with Matthias Lufkens, former social media director for the World Economic Forum in Davos, who tells us about the organization’s use of social media.  We caught up with him at PRSA’s Digital Impact, where he was one of the keynote presenters.  Over the next few week’s we’ll be sharing more interviews from the conference.

Matthias has several takeaways from his presentation:

1. The number of visitors to your own website is less and less important; organizations now have to be everywhere, on all the social sites.

2. Start by sharing riveting content.

3. Being active in social media means ceding control and letting people comment and share your content.

4. Create communities and then engage and lead them.

He has an additional piece of advice for communicators: look at online communities as your friends and that will change the way you build relationships with them.

Joe cites a KPMG study on how much social engagement activity emanated from Davos this year and how social media really opened the gathering to the world.

Gini calls out Matthias’ comment about having a small team and says with social media, a few people who know what they’re doing can accomplish a lot.  She doesn’t agree with his point about traffic your site being less relevant and believes social channels should drive people back to your site.

Martin mentions Matthias’ point about thinking of customers as friends and having that inform the way we communicate with them by avoiding the hard sell.

Want to meet us in person? Gini, Joe and I are going to be attending the PRSA Counselors Academy conference in New Orleans – Gini’s a keynote presenter, Joe’s doing a roundtable and I’m conference chair. We’re recording a show at the conference and doing more interviews with some of the smartest entrepreneurs in PR.  And everyone who attends gets a copy of Gini’s new book, Marketing in the Round.  Hope to see you there.

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Send us an email or an audio comment to [email protected], join the Inside PR Facebook group, leave us a comment here, message us @inside_pr on Twitter, or connect with Gini Dietrich, Joe Thornley, and Martin Waxman on Twitter.

Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer.

This week’s episode was produced by Kristine Simpson.

Special edition of Inside PR: talking Digital Impact with Eric Schwartzman

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PRSA’s Digital impact conference is happening in New York April 2 and 3 and we’re pleased to announce Inside PR is the official podcaster.
Martin talked with Eric Schwartzman, digital marketing consultant, entrepreneur, author, podcaster and founder/co-chair of Digital Impact about this year’s program. Now in its fourth year, the sold-out event is designed for PR professionals, marketing communicators, speechwriters and even entrepreneurs who are trying to integrate social into their strategy.  Its focus is earned media through social communications and it’s tailored to the PR community.

This year’s keynote lineup features:

Other sessions include a panel on PR and Wikipedia and whether or not PR people should be allowed to make changes on pages they manage; a communications professor talking about copyright, trademark and what you are and aren’t allowed to share; and several sessions on understanding influence, which tie directly into this year’s theme, ‘Influence and Persuasion’.

You can follow the hashtag #PRSADIconf Twitter.

We’ll be recording interviews with some of the presenters and keynotes.  And if you’re in New York, please drop by to say hi.

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Send us an email or an audio comment to [email protected], join the Inside PR Facebook group, leave us a comment here, message us @inside_pr on Twitter, or connect with Gini Dietrich, Joe Thornley, and Martin Waxman on Twitter.

Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer.

This week’s episode was produced by Kristine Simpson.

Inside PR 2.92: Is it social media or social business?

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We start with some exciting news about Inside PR’s new partnership with PRSA.  We’re heading to New York in early April to join them as the official podcaster of the PRSA Digital Impact conference.  They’ve got a great line-up of speakers and we’re planning to record a number of interviews with social media influencers that we’ll use on future shows.  Stay tuned for more details…

This week, we feature an interview with Giovanni Rodriguez that roving reporter Martin conducted at SXSW.  Giovanni is the person who introduced both Joe and Martin to social media at Counselors Academy in 2005. He’s been the managing partner at his own agency and is currently a consultant at Deloitte. And he’ll be presenting at the Digital Impact conference.

Giovanni talks about social business and what differentiates it from social media.  He believes social media as a term was always limiting because it forced the discipline into a marketing corner.

He goes on to say that social business is more inclusive in that it asks the question, how can people use these technologies and best practices to engage and empower their constituencies? These could include anyone in your network, your customers, employees, partners in your ecosystem.

He’s seeing new type of professional emerging; one that will offer offers a suite of services similar in scope to management consulting: strategy, discovery, benchmarks and road-mapping.

And Giovanni wonders whether or not intermediaries – that is, the role played by agents – will be eclipsed by trusted counselors and advisors.

Gini agrees the role of PR agencies is changing and that we need to move beyond impressions, understand an organization’s goals and develop programs that drive business results.

Joe thinks PR people are well positioned for the change Giovanni describes as we’ve been involved in monitoring and measurement, analysis, insight and strategy for quite some time and have a good understanding of the landscape and how to navigate in it.

What do you think?

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Send us an email or an audio comment to [email protected], join the Inside PR Facebook group, leave us a comment here, message us @inside_pr on Twitter, or connect with Gini Dietrich, Joe Thornley, and Martin Waxman on Twitter.

Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer.

This week’s episode was produced by Kristine Simpson.

Inside PR 2.90: We indemnify you

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First we mention for a new startup out of Toronto now in public beta. JugnooMe is a dashboard that helps small business owners figure out which messages to use on various platforms, how to schedule them and how to measure the results.  It also has a Social Advisor tool that acts like a virtual consultant and answers the question: what do you do next?

Jugnoo offers social search monitoring, reputation management, engagement, video creation from inside the platform, social commerce and analytics all under one roof. And there’s more to come.  Good luck to Danny Brown and Hessie Jones, who are both involved.

Martin kicks off the next segment by introducing a comment about Pinterest from listener Petra Opelova.

Gini talks about Pinterest’s copyright issues and how the company’s terms of service puts the onus on the user. As a result, people need to be careful about the items they’re pinning, because all the liability could fall on them.

Joe believes adhering to copyright is important and buys the images he uses on his blog and other sites. However, he says unless a person makes a concerted effort to ensure they own the items they’re sharing online, they’re at risk of violating copyright.  Joe compares Pinterest’s terms of service to the indemnity clause many large corporations add to their contracts, thereby shifting the risk from the company that has the resources to the small business it’s working with.

Do you adhere to copyright when you’re sharing online? What do you think about Pinterest’s terms of service and indemnity deflection? We’d love to hear from you.

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Send us an email or an audio comment to [email protected], join the Inside PR Facebook group, leave us a comment here, message us @inside_pr on Twitter, or connect with Gini Dietrich, Joe Thornley, and Martin Waxman on Twitter.

Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer.

This week’s episode was produced by Katie Charbonneau. Inside PR producer: Kristine Simpson.

Inside PR 2.87: We won’t delete your comments

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It’s been an interesting week around the web with lessons about good and not-so-good communications.  Gini mentions the blog post she wrote about the Susan G. Komen Foundation and how its decision to unplug their funding from Planned Parenthood’s breast cancer screenings created a huge outpouring of support for Planned Parenthood and a reputation issue for Komen.

She talks about how poorly Komen handled communications around the issue including deleting comments from its Facebook page. She and a few people tried a test where they posted comments – from benign to negative – and took screen captures of their posts.  The organization removed them all. She wonders why Komen didn’t consult with its communications advisors in advance to develop scenarios, messages and a crisis plan.

By now most of us have heard that based on the outcry, Komen reversed its decision.

We all agree deleting comments after the fact is one of the worst things organizations can do and they should decide at the outset whether or not they’ll accept comments and build trust via an open conversation.

Joe talks about Radio Royal York’s public video welcome to Blissdom organizers who were visiting Toronto.  He hasn’t decided if it’s a mistake or a good way to engage with a customer and asks if anyone else had seen something similar.  However, the situation is somewhat moot. At the time of writing, the video has been removed.

In case you missed it, our last topic is the upcoming Facebook IPO and the company’s disclosure that the majority of its revenue comes from ad dollars.

In fact, the big three social media players – Facebook, Twitter and Google+ – are all media companies of sorts and have finally figured out now they monetize their innovations – by selling us (and our data). There’s no doubt they’re great networks that extend the scope of our relationships, but we are still the product.

Martin wonders how they’ll deal with large policy issues like freedom of speech and feels governments should monitor the situation to ensure we keep the Internet open.  Joe isn’t happy with that type of intervention – he’d rather see governments focus on education and standards.

Next week is Social Media Week in various cities around the world.  Here’s where to get a full list of events.  And if you’re in Toronto on February 17, Third Tuesday Toronto is hosting a breakfast event on open government featuring Tony Clement, M.P., President of the Treasury Board of Canada. It should be a lively discussion.

And that’s a wrap! We’ll talk to you next week.

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Send us an email or an audio comment to [email protected], join the Inside PR Facebook group, leave us a comment here, message us @inside_pr on Twitter, or connect with Gini Dietrich, Joe Thornley, and Martin Waxman on Twitter.

Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer.

This week’s episode was produced by Kristine Simpson.

Inside PR 2.84: Are your measurement goals quantifiable and time-bound?

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This week, we feature another interview from the PRSA International Conference.  We talk to our good friend Shonali Burke, communications strategist and author of the Waxing Unlyrical blog, about PR and social media measurement, a subject all PR people should pay attention to because it demonstrates the value of our work and whether or not we’ve achieved our goals.

Shonali calls out three problems in the way we approach measurement:

  1. The concept of measurable objectives has been lost – our objectives must be quantifiable and time-bound.
  2. Buzz is not a goal – because people don’t know what they’re trying to achieve, they’re not approaching communications strategically.
  3. People overcomplicate. Don’t focus on the tools but on what you’re trying to track and how.

Shonali mentions the Blue Key campaign, which asks Americans to donate $5 to raise awareness and support for refugee issues and how they track the program using custom URLs, Google Analytics and other tools to identify emerging trends.

She’s tired of PR professionals saying they’re not good at numbers and advises us to, ‘stop getting freaked out by math!’

Gini mentions that it’s not impressions or ad equivalencies that are important, but how we deliver the kinds of results that mean something to a client’s business.  Joe adds that being in PR, we’re dealing with digital data all the time and need to get good at that.  Martin suggests that as professional communicators we are all in business and, as such, should learn and understand the fundamentals of business.

Are you measuring your programs effectively and in a way that demonstrates real value to your clients or organizations?  Do you have any thoughts or cases to add? We’d love to hear from you.

And thanks Shonali.

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Send us an email or an audio comment to [email protected], join the Inside PR Facebook group, leave us a comment here, message us @inside_pr on Twitter, or connect with Gini Dietrich, Joe Thornley, and Martin Waxman on Twitter.

Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer.

This week’s episode was produced by Kristine Simpson.