Category: Digital Marketing and Social Media

PR Farmville

 


PR Pros: Are you playing Farmville? C’mon…admit it!

Farmville has taken over many Facebook users’ Facebook time and has spread throughout my friend list, my firm, and my house.    

I have had a hard time understanding the appeal.  To me, a requirement of a good video game is that I get to annihilate Nazis, aliens, or Brett Favre. But I’m obviously missing out on something as several people who I think are sane and intelligent have gotten neck deep in it. So now I’m fascinated with this phenomenon. 

I would like to ask for feedback about Farmville particularly from PR pros, journalists, bloggers, and any anyone working in or around the media.

Note: this is purely academic and for my own interest. I am not working for Farmville or any competitor. 

  • What do you like about Farmville?
  • What keeps you coming back?

Please comment here or if you prefer to do so privately, please email me your thoughts at jmonson@enr-corp.com or DM me at @jackmonson

Thanks PR Farmers!

MatchPoint: Finalist for PR Innovation of the Year at PRWeek Awards

 

I am pleased to pass along the good news that MatchPoint has been nominated for The PRWeek PR Innovation of the Year Award!

Full disclosure: I’m a member of the development team for MatchPoint.  Additional disclosure: I am freakin’ thrilled about this!

 
A tip of the hat to all nominees:

Edelman and American Thoracic Society The TB Advocacy Toolkit

Ketchum The Ketchum Media Optimizer: Adding Discipline to the PR Discipline

Ketchum Virtual Meeting Mashups – Reinventing Online Events

Waggener Edstrom Worldwide What’s on Your Mind? Now Anyone Can Decipher Twitter Discussion with the Help of twendz!

eNR Services, Inc. and MatchPoint MatchPoint for PR

 
Saying it’s an honor just to be nominated along with these top global PR agencies is not just an old cliché in this case. I cannot think of a previous year where any non-agency PR application, software, or service was nominated for PR Innovation of the Year.  

See you at the PRWeek Awards  on March 11 in NYC!

I’m So Busy! Oh, Shut Up.

The PR and Media Relations industry is made up of people who are chronically busy. But…are they really?
 
We all have those people in our lives who take every occasion to tell you how busy they are. These are same individuals who can’t make a deadline or return a call promptly. But, they have plenty of time to update their Facebook status with how busy they are, how they are longing for the weekend, or what they’re having for lunch.  Lunch?!?  Hmmm, I thought you were really busy…   
 

If you’re one of these offenders: Stop! Do yourself a favor and stop!
 
When you tell people – especially business associates – that you’re “so busy,” you’re really telling them that:

•You are a poor time manager
•You cannot handle your current workload, and therefore…
•You could not take on more tasks and so could not be of much help to anyone else
 
Face it, you’re no more busy, stressed, or under pressure than ANY of your peers, co-workers, or clients. If you truly believe you are, then it’s time for a change! The New Year is a perfect time to make that change – or suck it up.

I’ve seen many lists over the past two weeks of buzz words for PR pros to avoid in 2010. Let’s make “busy” one of them!

New PR Tool: Pitch with Me

  
A new free online tool was added to your PR Workbench this month: Pitch with Me.

We have seen many new media relations tools and apps launched this year claiming to be more useful than the rest. Most of these are just more of the same: new ways to blast out PR Spam, SEO “experts” who think they know more about Google than you do, and Social Media monitoring tools that actually do nothing but look cool. 

Pitch With Me rises above this PR app jam not with a glitzier app, but with a new concept in media relations. Or rather, a time-tested and proven concept put into an online form.

The idea of teaming up two or more clients for a story pitch has worked inside large agencies for decades. Agencies not only created a more attractive package, but also created efficiencies with resources and time.  But smaller firms and independent practitioners often saw an industry peer as a competitor rather than a symbiotic friend.

Journalists will use what they need and toss the rest anyway, so why not offer more to potentially use? And you never know when your partner’s a story may be what grabs someone’s attention.

Kudos to Heather Whaling for creating this online bullpen of potential collaborators! You can check out co-pitching opportunities on the site or by following @pitchwithme. If anyone has used Pitch With Me already, please share your comments here.

Dear CEOs: Social Media Is Not E-Commerce

The first Black Friday and Cyber Monday since the Great 2009 Social Media Explosion are now behind us. The first reports are in and it looks like many retailers had a great week.

I wonder if any CEOs who recently “gave in” to their marketing advisors and signed off on SM efforts are right now going over sales figures for the year and wondering why they’re not seeing a big payoff from Social Media.

The reality is Social Media is not e-commerce.

I’m not criticizing any CEOs who don’t get that…yet!  For now, I am finding fault with any marketing directors (and God forbid any PR managers) who sold Social Media efforts internally as online magic that makes cash registers ring.

I fear that some people in the marketing and communications industry have set unreachable goals in order to sell their CEOs on Social Media Campaigns. Or perhaps they are measuring social media mentions in terms of Revenue per Tweet.

There IS an online community where any company can expect the cash register to ring the moment they establish a presence. It’s called e-bay.

But unlike social media, e-commerce and auction sites won’t allow an organization to engage with its customers, learn from them, build loyalty, and all of the things that social media can do that we haven’t thought of yet!

Thanks to my colleague Jeff Tidyman of eNR Services  for suggesting this topic. End of rant and enough blogging for today… I’ve got to go check on how my eBay auctions are doing. That’s where the big money is.

Pitching Bloggers

I’ve been working on a research project for the past few weeks regarding the pitching of bloggers. I’m reaching out to thousands of bloggers on behalf of the MatchPoint application for PR pros to gauge their interest in receiving pitches, news, notes, and social media news releases from MatchPoint’s clients.

The team that developed MatchPoint decided (thankfully!) to make it an Opt-In service and ask bloggers’ permission to provide the bloggers’ email addresses to MatchPoint’s clients. Many bloggers have been rightfully outing PR people for spamming when they use old school databases that mass-blast PR Spam from their media lists.

 
Of those bloggers with whom I spoke:

•12% expressed not wanting to have their email address visible to PR people nor wanted to receive pitches via email

•52% said they would be open to emails from PR, BUT ONLY if the pitch was exactly on point, relevant to their blog, or from a PR person who has obviously read their blog posts

•36% said they would opt in to receive PR emails and in fact rarely get any PR pitches
 
I think that last point is most significant. There are many bloggers who have a huge appetite for your news content! It’s notable that this is not an obscure group of bloggers; all were in the top 100,000 blogs by traffic. Most likely, that last group of bloggers is not in most PR Spam databases.

So go get ’em! Just be sure you know each blogger’s preferred method of receiving pitches whether it’s email, via their blog, DM, or carrier pigeon. Also make sure your content is relevant to what they typically write.

New Header Design

I want to take just a moment to thank my friend Stan Phelps for designing a new header pic for this blog. Stan is the EVP at Synergy Events who I met at the recent PRSA conference in San Diego. He did a nice job of taking my probably poorly described idea of what I was trying to do on this blog and made it look exactly like it did in my head!
 
You should also check out Stan’s marketing blog and be sure to ask him about “Marketing Lagniappe”!

 

PRSA 2009 Conference in San Diego – Tweetup Roundup

 
There are several Tweetups planned during the PRSA Conference in San Diego. The links below will take you to the RSVP site for each. They are all great opportunities to network and engage others in the industry!


Shonali’s Tweetup
Basic
410 10th Ave
Saturday Nov 7, 5-7pm
http://twtvite.com/okxl1p 


San Diego Media & PR Tweetup
Vin de Syrah
901 5th Ave
Sunday Nov 8, 6-9pm
http://twtvite.com/chjl0t/1


PRSA Tweetup
Tin Fish
170 6th Ave
Monday Nov 9, 7:30-8:30pm
http://tweetvite.com/event/PRSA09Tweetup 
Hosted by PRSA Tech Section!


Monday Night Tweetup
Basic
410 10th Ave
Monday Nov 9, 8-10pm
http://twtvite.com/38n3yy 
Sponsored by Mashable, PitchEngine, Technorati, and Comet Branding

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I’ll add to this list as more are organized. Please email me at jmonson@enr-corp.com or Tweet me @jackmonson if you have any to add!

PRSA 2009 Conference in San Diego – Packing List

Heading to The PRSA 2009 Conference this weekend? 2009internationalLogo
Here are a few things to remember to bring:

 

 

•Hand sanitizer. Seriously. It should be a new conference and trade show rule that everyone has to carry a bottle.  The only thing I want to bring home is some new ideas.

•Business cards – whatever number you were planning to bring, double it.

•You don’t have your @twitter handle printed on your cards yet? Take 20 minutes this week and write it on the back of  a couple of dozen. Because at the show, no, I don’t have a pen!

 

Remember, if you can’t make it to the conference, please check back here throughout the week. I’ll be blogging throughout each day with conference notes, updates, interviews, and photos.

 

PRSA 2009 Conference in San Diego

2009internationalLogo

Are you registered for the PRSA 2009 International Conference? If not, do so today and join the conversation!

November 7 – 10marinaHotelview
San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina
333 West Harbor Drive, San Diego, CA
Register here: http://www.prsa.org/ic2009/register.html

 
If you can’t make to the PRSA conference, please check back here.  I’ll be blogging throughout the day each day with conference notes, updates, interviews, photos.

My colleague Jeff Tidyman and I will be speaking about MatchPoint, the Associated Press Planner, and other tools and tactics our clients are using to tell the right story at the right time. We’re setting up attendees with free access to the MatchPoint application – readers of this blog are also welcome to access MatchPoint for FREE for a limited time to check it out: http://www.prmatchpoint.com/

See you in San Diego!