The Lead

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How to Grow a Right Lobe and Rule!

Posted by Bob Brin on August 28, 2008 at 4:25 PM

For those of you who lean to the right -- intellectually -- here's a great book: A Whole New Mind - Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. It's based upon six aptitudes: design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning. They provide a good mindset for when you need to describe to those who lean leftward that specs, numbers and process diagrams aren't enough to win. Nor is simply attaching graphics to messages. Right-brained thinking, engineering, manufacturing, positioning and metaphorical story telling is more compelling, and therefore vital, in a world of rapid and rabid competition.

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Twitter's Business Model Challenge

Posted by Matt Kucharski on August 28, 2008 at 1:56 PM

Interesting article from PRNews on the challenges that Twitter is having extending its business model so that it can actually make money. A pretty good example of the tension between credibility and viability that both traditional and non-traditional media properties face. I remember the days when Google was my favorite search engine because it didn't have all of the advertising crap that other engines had. Today, not so much.

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The exotic side of PR or How to get a rhino to smile

Posted by Bob Brin on August 13, 2008 at 12:36 PM

Had to share this photo of Padilla zealot Katherine Brozek on a marketing case study assignment in the Ohio outback.

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The Choreography of the Click meets the Clique

Posted by Bob Brin on August 13, 2008 at 10:28 AM

We often talk about "The Choreography of the Click" as a way of thinking through the desired and potential behaviors of participants in any online campaign. It involves mapping out the steps you want campaign "interactors" to take and also those steps they might take despite your best laid plans. We consider these kinds of questions:

Where will they come from (search engines, ads, e-mail, etc.)?

What behaviors do we want?

How will we make it clear what we want them to do?

What kind of experience do they/we want?

What will THEY want to do?

How will we engage them?

Now, enter the clique, or the online social network and the questions become:

How sharable is the news, widget or even the experience?

Can they make it theirs?

Does it help the interactor play a part in their social world, versus just in your world?

How does it help them engage with others?

The campaign choreographer's role becomes that of an orchestrator of free-form dance. You create the stage, set the mood, provide the props and mastermind the theme. Then let the individuals create the magic.

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Client Service -- It Starts With Engaged Staff

Posted by Matt Kucharski on August 11, 2008 at 2:44 PM

Fellow Counselors Academy member J.R. Hipple of Hipple and Associates put together a nice article in PRSA's Tactics Magazine on what agencies are doing these days to improve client service, and a lot of it centers around making sure that staff are enabled to deliver top-notch service. Taking a page from consumer brands like Southwest Airlines, it seems that agencies would do well to let those on the front lines make the decisions whenever possible. Padilla CEO Lynn Casey calls it the "ownership culture" and it works.

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FW: Slaughterhouse 5W: PR Firms Ethics Are Anything but Kosher

Posted by Matt Kucharski on August 11, 2008 at 2:34 PM

Sorry folks, a little behind on postings. This one's from the editors at PRNews calling the question on some of the tactics used to by an agency in support of a Kosher meat processing facility in Iowa. PRSA Counselors Academy executive committee member Ann Higgins is among the posters, as is PRSA Fellow Mike Herman. All the discussion relating to ethics in PR these days seems to center on transparency, and that's not a bad thing, I suppose.

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Blogger outreach and how not to overreach

Posted by Bob Brin on August 7, 2008 at 7:55 AM

Social media good-guy Jason Falls passed us this blog entry by Chris Brogan What I Want PR and Marketing Professionals To Know. You may have heard most of it before, but it's a good reminder or something to pass on the client or boss who just wants those hits any way you can get them.

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New media: a mile wide and dangerously shallow?

Posted by Bob Brin on August 2, 2008 at 2:37 PM

I was in a meeting the other day with few people on social media plans and the brand manager commented that the new landscape was a mile wide and an inch deep. I think that's true if you look at social media as just media. We're facing many, many more "outlets" from blogs to Twitter to Facebook and so on . . . and on. Some have thousands of followers and some six (this blog falling somewhere in between). It's tough when you're a marketer trying to decide where you spend your dollars when you need to include this new stuff along with all of the traditional media like radio and billboards.

Of course, social media is not just another media. It's made up of societies. You can no longer just create a message and broadcast. Each "outlet" is a community. And while you can have communicators discover, monitor and -- to a degree -- immerse themselves in these communities, they can't completely broker the relationship on your behalf.

So where do you invest your dollars and your time? Well, as the media (meaning reporters) realize that much of the real-time dialog is happening in these communities, that's where they hang out to get their ideas and immerse themselves in the dialog or at least listen in. They want to be where the action is. So you too need to go where the societies are, get in and get involved. If you've got nothing to talk about except your products, you're not going to be terribly popular. Diving below the surface is where you find the opportunities.

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