December 4-5,2007.
Toronto.
The Canadian Institute's conference on social media.
For those outside Toronto, it would be a pricey affair, since the conference registration is nearly $2,000 not counting HST, travel and all the assorted things that go with it.
But take a look at the agenda and speakers and you'll likely agree it is a leading edge session for public relations professionals and well worth the energy and expense involved in getting there.
Here are descriptions of just two sessions:
Targeting Bloggers as Influential Media to Get Your Story Out
Susan Bloch-Nevitte, Executive Director, Public Affairs
Art Gallery of OntarioAntonietta Mirabelli
Manager, Communications
Art Gallery of Ontario
The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) last year launched a blogger outreach campaign to start a conversation with the public about the Frank Gehry: Art + Architecture exhibition. The alternative media coverage generated by blogs resulted in a very positive impact on the exhibition’s promotion. For the first time in the AGO’s history, the Web became a critical vehicle in building awareness, influencing public opinion and driving attendance. Learn how social media are a key component of the AGO’s communication and
marketing channels and how the AGO plans to optimize this network of bloggers going forward.• Determine if you should be aiming your story to make the front page of the Globe and Mail or Google
• Find out how to research bloggers and determine who should be on your media list
• Learn how to build relationships with this targeted group
• Capitalize on the additional coverage of blogging that traditional media do not provide
• Benefit from the ability of media bloggers to cover events and product launches within minutes
• Understand the power shift from traditional media to networked blogger media
Fifteen Megs of Fame: How to Manage Your Brand in an Era of Consumer Control
Michael Seaton
Director, Digital Marketing
ScotiabankBrands are now and forever outside ivory tower control –and there is no turning back. As social media, consumer generated content and digital distribution gain in popularity, everyone can readily achieve their ‘Fifteen Megs of Fame.’ But how can you achieve that? How do you manage your brand in today’s digital world where consumers are creators? Hear how one of Canada’s top banks developed a long-term
digital strategy that consumers have embraced and learn the tips and tricks that will help you develop your own strategy, whether you’re in the financial industry or not.
Radical stuff? Not at all, at least in many parts of the world. There's also an interest sidebar to the growth in social media that might surprise many in the PR business and even those outside. Just as the advent of e-mail brought a renewed emphasis on writing skills, so too has social media brought to the fore once again the basic principles of effective public relations.
Like pitching a story, one of the components of media relations. This issue gets batted around on any number of public relations blogs out there and it all seems to come back to the simple principles that should be guiding relations with conventional media. What the PR blogs seem to have turned up is a lot of bad practices that are likely being applied to other media with equally disastrous results.
The difference between blogs and conventional media is that bloggers might be inclined to express their opinion openly on the blog about the fumbled approach. Notice the conditional word: "might". Responsible bloggers, i.e. the ones with the target audience a PR professional or a marketer might want to reach, would be no more likely to have a free poke at a clumsy pitcher than a print or electronic media editor.
In this little corner of the new media, the experience has been, well, there is no experience. No phone calls, no pitches of any kind. One lone news release that was forwarded after the date it was issued. Now that seems to conform to the general pattern in Newfoundland and Labrador in which social media have been completely ignored by both PR practitioners and marketers as possible tools in their own arsenal or as possible media to reach core audiences.
If you can forgive a little shameless self-promotion, look at it this way: Bond Papers averages 18,000 page loads and 11,500 readers. The daily readers include government officials, financial analysts, lawyers, people in the energy industry, educators and basically a core group of relatively affluent and influential people both within Newfoundland and Labrador and across Canada.
Reporters and editors read Bond Papers, too. Anyone who reads Bond regularly will know that posts here will turn up in conventional media fairly regularly. Part of the attraction for some people is being slightly ahead of the curve on some items, but that's another issue. Basically, after nearly three years, Bond Papers is a medium that reaches audiences individually and collectively, that would normally attract some attention from PR people or marketers.
Bond Papers isn't a blog focusing on mothers - as in one post linked above - nor is it focused on a technical issue like the latest digital cameras. It's easy to see a connection between the blog and the marketing possibilities in those cases. But still, it would take no more energy to research those blogs than to find out about Bond or any other blog in the province to see if there is a possible fit.
This post came, inadvertently, out of a conversation between your humble e-scribbler and an old hand at the PR game who has forgotten more about PR than most of us will ever know; that's not a cliche in this case. This guy likely inspired that remark in the first place. The local Leo was excited about the conference and passed the brochure along since he reads Bond Papers regularly. He keeps abreast of issues in the business even though he's been retired for a while and it seemed a good time to remind him that so much of what PR people do today is exactly what he has been doing his entire career.
The new media wind up reinforcing the basic lessons of the past, with a new twist for a new age. The new media wound up breathing some fresh air into some skills some people have forgotten.
And at the same time, it led your e-scribbler to wonder once again about the difference between the local market and those elsewhere.
Maybe there's something to the observation that the only obvious reference made to new media at a recent local conference was made in a keynote speech by the guy who publishes the province's largest circulation daily newspaper.
-srbp-