Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

Need a break from all the intense issues in the headlines these days? Make your voice heard on the red-hot question of whether you roll your toilet paper over or under. [I promise to use massive willpower to avoid all the easy bathroom puns.] Cottonelle is going all out with its Roll Poll, creating a feisty forum for debating the pros and cons of how you roll.

You can start a Roll Poll Throwdown – basically choosing from characters such as a tough firefighter and high society matron [for the Over team] and an uber-hip yoga guy and crazy cat lady [for the Under team] to give their best reasons. You don't really believe these are real people, but they are just serious enough to be funny. Then you can cast your own vote.

It's a genius way to promote a product easily taken for granted: Tap into an irresistible debate [much like Coke or Pepsi, creamy or crunchy peanut butter] to get people talking. It's a topic where very few people are ambivalent. You just can't help taking sides. As of this writing, Over is the clear winner – 76% to 24%. North Carolina is a heavy over state at 86%. Yes, you can check a US map to see how your state voted with street videos of opinionated rollers from each state. Interestingly, California is the only under state. [Hmmm...what do we make of that?]

The Roll Poll took advantage of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube along with TV ads and guerilla ads spotted on trains and bus stops. And it appears that the mommy blogs have bought in. A quick Google search turns up tons of them. Apparently Cottonelle got the word out to this key consumer audience by offering free TP – a month's worth – to bloggers who encouraged their readers to go vote.

And no TP campaign would be complete without a celebrity or two. Tori Spelling and Dean McDermott are taking opposite sides, appearing at the Roll Poll Great Debate in Times Square in honor of Thomas Crapper Day, Jan. 27. [No, really, he's credited with the invention of the flush toilet. Historians say it was John Harrington, but that's another debate.]

It's all light-hearted fun with serious branding all over it. So how do you roll?

The far Left is wailing and gnashing teeth over the Supreme Court's mystifying decision equating a corporation's political free speech rights to an individual's. My friends on the Left are gnawing their fingernails over the prospect of corporations spending millions to defeat an elected official who dares to cross the corporation.

They fret that after one or two politicians are picked off by the vengeful corporation, others will fold like a cheap suit, toward the will of rapacious corporate interests.

Not so fast.

If the Supremes had issued this goofball ruling in 1975, that might have been the case. Back then, we had three networks, along with three strong local stations affiliates, and we had a local newspaper. Their advertising rates were so expensive only corporations could afford these primary ways of communicating with voters.

But today, the Internet has vaporized that barrier to the entrance of the town square. Look no farther than Obama campaign manager David Plouffe's fine book, "The Audacity to Win." In writing about the campaign's communication strategy, Plouffe rarely mentions TV advertising without also underscoring the importance of YouTube and social media to Obama's success.

Anybody with a broadband connection and something to say can generate an equal and opposite reaction to corporate expenditures attempting to take down an errant officeholder.

But more important, it's unlikely that we'll see corporations spending millions of dollars to oust offending politicians simply because the risks far outweigh the rewards. Sure, millions in TV advertising by a company could result in some feckless politician losing an election.

But let's remember - corporations never win popularity contests with voters. After the bank bailout, executive compensation and million-dollar bonuses on Wall Street, corporate America is more unpopular than ever. Let's face it - many corporations are remarkably ham-fisted when it comes to the intersection of business and politics.

In some respects, being attacked by a corporation could be the best thing that could happen to a candidate.

Who has time for all these tweets, retweets, invitations to connect, status updates, links and blog posts? I want to keep up with social media, but can't always find time. After an initially flurry of activity, I've settled on five tactics to stay reasonably engaged without losing sleep. Here they are:

Set expectations. I am realistic. I don't expect social media to work miracles but I expect to get something in return for my time. I limit my activity to three networks. I use Facebook almost exclusively for staying in touch with friends. LinkedIn is a professional networking, research and recruiting tool. The jury is still out for me on Twitter.

Listen. I get more out of social media from listening than posting. While I am skeptical about Twitter's value over the long term, I find it is a great source for news and information that I would not otherwise find. I also get to eavesdrop on smart, interesting people like Cord Silverstein, Walker Smith, Audra Marotta and Mark McNeely.

Monitor. Monitoring for me is different than listening I don't like surprises, so I use monitoring to stay a step ahead. I get alerts on news about Capstrat, clients and other groups that are important to me.

Mobile. Social media is yet another reason I love my Blackberry. Downloading the apps makes it easy to check status updates while I'm sitting at a soccer game (but not while one of my daughters is on the field) or retweet an @capstrat post while waiting for takeout.

Sharing versus posting. I don't create much original content. Frankly, I don't think anyone cares what I had for breakfast. I share articles, invitations to events, blog posts, etc. Most Web sites make it easy to share content.

Social media can take as much time as you allow. But with a few tools and boundaries you can stay connected in just a few minutes each day.

When users share a link on their wall, Facebook automatically tries to grab a thumbnail image to include with the link. This image can really help get the item attention when it is viewed on other people's news feed.

Facebook scans the page and gives you a choice of a few different images. Which images it picks can seem a bit random. Our experience is that it Facebook looks for small squarish images starting at the top of the page.

Specify Your Facebook Share Thumbnail Image

You can specify exactly which image Facebook uses for the thumbnail using a link tag in the head of your page.

<link rel="image_src" type="image/jpeg" href="http://www.domain.com/path/icon-facebook.gif" />

The name is unimportant (as long as it's correct). Use a global URL to avoid confusion.

Other Meta

Make sure the page has a title and description meta tag. Facebook will use these elements when it pre-populates the link description and title.

Austin may be known for being weird, but the South By Southwest Interactive conference filled the city with thousands of the most connected, iPhone wielding, Twittering, Mac using early adopters on Earth.

The producers of the conference tried to stock the schedule with a wide array of topics, but Twitter and social media were the topics du jour. In the middle of the day tweets with the #sxsw hash tag are being posted so fast that it would be easier to drink from a fire hose.

Apparently wired is the new weird, in case you missed the memo.

• Karly Hand - Karly Hand
  
• Erin Portman - Erin Portman PR
• Brian Solis - PR 2.0
  
• Peter Shankman - HARO

In a world riddled with ADD, where TMI blogging and DIY reporting are the norm, are PR agencies still relevant? All sides will discuss the Pros & Cons of public relations in the digital age. - SXSW 2009

I was particularly interested in this as Capstrat is always billed as a PR agency - though we consider ourselves a communications agency. Three other colleagues were interested in this conversation for the exact same reason.

I cannot speak for them, but I found the conversation dissappointing. The conversation was not as challenging as I wanted it to be and focused mainly on Twitter. In fact, the audience was so fond of Twitter that the session ended up being one of the most popular terms on Twitter. There are 61 pages of results on Twitter Search for #PR2. Most popular tweet: "PR is getting people to do your job for you."

One of the panelists suggested that every brand should be on Twitter. Does every brand need to be tweeting? Absolutely not. Does every brand need to pay attention to what people are saying about them on Twitter? Absolutely.

To stay relevant, PR agencies need to have online specialties that expand beyond Twitter. You don't need to create Web sites, but you need to be able to engage in the social media world as necessary.

When you are tweeting, you have to decide if your tweet is yogurt or informational yogurt. The fact that you are eating yogurt is not informational, but the fact that you got a discount on the Pinkberry yogurt is relevant.

If you are a PR person that is trying to figure out how to navigate the social media world, consider reading Brian Solis' blog PR 2.0. If you are a client looking to navigate the social media world, contact us.

How can something as cutting edge as social media be considered old school? Because it goes to the heart of communicating. That’s the upshot of a couple of talks Darren Barefoot gave at a Web Content Conference [WC08] put on by Duo Consulting in Chicago. This totally engaging Canadian started his presentation quoting from Shakespeare’s Henry V and a drawing of the theater used in Elizabethan England – not exactly what you’d expect for a presentation on the many facets of social media. Barefoot pointed out that someone drew the theater after hearing about it, then copied it and published it. It underscored for me that social media isn’t suddenly working because of the power of Web 2.0 tools. These tools simply give people who are hungry to communicate an easier way to do it.

At his second talk, Barefoot used a decidedly low-tech approach – he hung 29 cards naming social media tools on a clothesline of sorts. Borrowing from Theatre Skam's 29 Plays in 59 Minutes concept, he asked the audience to call out a social media technology. He’d rip it off the line and riff for several minutes [of course, some kept falling off the line early, providing even more comic relief]. He covered everything from the ubiquitous Wikipedia to emerging surprises like Kyte.tv and Ustream. For the last two, he even admitted to the dreaded feeling of “Kids seem to like these but I don’t know why….” Made me feel a little better for not even knowing about them yet. 29 tools in an hour and a half. Not bad.

Early in the network premiere week, it looks like the sitcom writers have discovered social media. Prime time characters are now talking about blogs, their MySpace pages and Google alerts.
 
You’d think this would open up interesting new plot lines or story angles. Not so.
 
Instead, we’re getting flat-footed jokes followed by canned laugh tracks.  “I’m putting that in my blog!” is the new comeback.
 
In primetime, social networks are now the domain of nerds. “I have a 112 friends in MySpace,” says one geek in Big Bang Theory. “Yeah, but have you actually met any of them?” quips his equally geeky friend.
 
I read today that Microsoft is considering taking a stake in MySpace. If MySpace is now the joke of primetime television, I think Microsoft missed the window.