Category: Uncategorized

Watching the Phillies game, writing a blog post, sitting with my wife,
I opened the Instagram iPhone app on my phone.
The latest post in my feed was from Robert Scoble, a tech evangelist.
It was an image of a rainbow, with a comment on the death of Mr.
Jobs.

It was posted less than ten minutes after the official news release
by Apple.

To a photo-sharing app.

That’s only available on one brand of smartphone (and nowhere on a computer).

How can we continue to believe that we can control a message
anymore,
when we don’t even know where the information resides? Because no one
(outside of paparazzi) monitors Instagram for breaking news, and yet
that’s where this news broke.

My thoughts on Mr. Jobs death? Sadness, obviously. Too young. While
I’m an iOS devotee, I don’t believe that his greatest contribution was
any sort of technology or software. It was his modeling of a behavior
that has influenced hundreds of young, brilliant entrepreneurs: be
reckless and bold and firm, understand that perfection is far more
important than money, and incrementalism is for losers. Those
messages, when placed into the hands of the right people can literally
move mountains (and industries). Indeed they have for millennia. Mr.
Jobs was just another in a long line of game-changers. We should all
be so bold.

Yesterday I attended a Basic Media Training course sponsored by our local Task Force. The course was very good, and I continue to have the same problems as always in front of the camera. It’s a process, they say.

What I wanted to pass along, though, was something mentioned in the handouts from the day. Developed by the Coastal Vitality Project, this PR Toolbox page is intended to give you and your agency some tools to up your PR game. The Media Relations Resources PDF is the handout that we got, and it included some really interesting tools that I didn’t know existed, mostly about Twitter.

More and more, members of the media are establishing presences on social media networks to allow members of the public to get direct access to their favorite reporters. From the public’s perspective, they now get to actually talk to the pretty guys and gals they see on TV every night and actually participate in the newscasts; from the media’s perspective, they can now get tips from thousands upon thousands of people. Win-win, as they say. For our agencies, though, this is great news because we now also can get that direct access to reporters. The problem is that it’s time-consuming to make all of those contacts.

(I’ve got two media lists on my Twitter account, national media and local media, that took forever to put together and are now horribly out of date. I’ll keep you posted as they get updated.)

So, how to manage all of that information? Use a (free) service like those mentioned on the Media Relations Resources PDF. The page explicitly mentions the MediaOnTwitter.com website, but that appears to no longer be in service. In the section, the Project also mentions two other services that are similar: JournalistTweets.com and MuckRack.com. I’ll make no recommendations on how good these sites are, but they exist, so someone finds ’em useful.

And while we’re on the topic, let me be sure to pass along the link to the always useful GovTwit.com, which allows government officials, agencies and workerbees to post and categorize their Twitter accounts for ease of finding.

Reason number ten thousand one on why to read things beyond your
speciality: this recent post on
Mashable. Seven
tips to “stickier” blog posts, sounds kind of SEO-like, kind of
PR-ish, slimy maybe? Not Mashable, and man, the first tip, oh man is
it good. Titled Mix Stock and Flow Content, it describes one way to
keep your blog fresh. Since I like to recommend that agencies look
into using blogs and Facebook Pages, here’s a tip for how to keep the
content fresh and interesting.

“Stock” content is the bedrock of a blog. It’s original, typically longer-form content that’s insightful and outstanding. This is what keeps people coming back hungrily for your expertise or unique wit. A clear voice and angle that people can count on is often the hallmark of good bedrock content.

“Flow” content is shorter, curated links and excerpts from related content around the web. Think of it like what The Huffington Post or Buzzfeed do: They take web content their readers are likely to be interested in and put their own commentary on it, linking back to the full text off-site. Without the commentary, you’re just another aggregator; and without proper attribution and linking to the original source, you jeopardize your relationship with the original site (and break copyright law if you plagiarize parts of or the whole post).

Seems like a pretty good idea to me. In fact, might be a good idea for
this blog. I’ve done a few of these “via” posts that highlight a
passage or an image or a video. I’d like to do more, and I’m going to
make a concerted effort to pass along some of the cool tidbits that I
find from time to time. A bit more flow, if you will. If you come
across anything that you think our little community might enjoy,
please send it along!