Wrap-Up

So it’s the end of my PR 107- Campaigns class. I really enjoyed working with Operation Homefront-NY/NJ and the class as a whole. Operation Homefront is a great organization and I’m grateful for the opportunity to help them increase their awareness on Long Island and I hope it only continues to grow in the future.

It has been interesting to look at this experience and try to think about how it will match up after graduation. With only one week left, the real world is creeping in. This class definitely gave me some good lessons about how things work “on the outside.”

My job application process has been tedious, but I there are plenty of PR openings that I’ve seen that I felt qualified for, and I think that partial comes from these real-world introductions in the class. There are real lessons with lessened consequences, which allows for more experimentation, something that is always needed.

Ultimately, I’m ready to see where I’ll end up and how I’ll be putting my PR skills to use. I’m also excited and interested to see where my fellow graduates, both in this class and in the department, end up too.

Bad PR from Burson-Marsteller

It was revealed on May 12 that Facebook hired the PR firm Burson-Marsteller “to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy. Burson even offered to help an influential blogger write a Google-bashing op-ed, which it promised it could place in outlets like The Washington Post, Politico, and The Huffington Post.”

“The plot backfired when the blogger turned down Burson’s offer and posted the emails that Burson had sent him” BusinessInsider.com wrote. “It got worse when USA Today broke a story accusing Burson of spreading a “whisper campaign” about Google “on behalf of an unnamed client.”

Burson-Marsteller released a statement saying:

“Whatever the rationale, this was not at all standard operating procedure and is against our policies, and the assignment on those terms should have been declined. When talking to the media, we need to adhere to strict standards of transparency about clients, and this incident underscores the absolute importance of that principle.”

These are the types of things that give PR people and the profession in general a bad name. It makes it appear that we are just there to bend the truth to fit our own ends, which Burson-Marsteller was doing for Facebook.

Their statement shows that they know what they did was bad PR, but it’s a little late for that. They’ve already taken the client and added to negative image that PR can sometimes get. They talk about treating media respectfully, but they did the exact opposite of that for their client before being caught.

Toyota Helps Community; Good PR Move

As a result of the March 11 earthquake in Japan the Toyota Tundra plant in San Antonio, Texas has a parts shortage, which means that the plant won’t be able to run at full capacity. There are 2,800 employees at the plant that would normally be faced with hard times because of this development, but Toyota is, instead, using their employees’ downtime to help the community.

Toyota announced that one of the options available to employees is to work to build homes with Habitat for Humanity, which will allow them to still collect a full paycheck. Employees also have the option of signing up for training or taking unpaid leave.

This seems like a great idea from Toyota. There could have been stories about them having to cut employees’ pay or hours because of the slowed production, but they managed to find a way to improve their community and gain good publicity from it, while also keeping their employees working and invigorated.

More companies need to look into ways of getting involved in their communities, from a PR perspective, but also from a social responsibility perspective, and create incentives for their employees to want to participate in them. Actions like this create a lasting impression on communities and can create loyalty to a brand.

When customers can relate to a company or brand in a greater way than just a product (as a community activist or volunteer, for example) then there is a meaningful connection between that customer and the company. For a company, this is harder to ear, but it will also last longer than a quick deal or some other gimmick.

Microsoft's Disaster Tweet

After the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan on March 11^th Microsoft’s Bing Department sent out a tweet that was very negatively received. It appeared to many Twitter users that this department of Microsoft was using the disaster to promote themselves.

The tweet said:

How you can #SupportJapan - http://binged.it/fEh7iT. For every retweet, @bing will give $1 to Japan quake victims, up to $100K.

What users were angry about was the notion that the money would only be sent to Japan if enough people retweeted this message. Users with large followings soon started making their frustration with this tactic known. One example was Michael Ian Black, who accused them of using a tragedy as a marketing opportunity.

Microsoft eventually donated all $100K, which just shows how bad of an idea this retweet to raise money was. If they were going to donate the money, which they pretty clearly were going to do, they should have done it without these weird strings attached.

I think the biggest thing to take away from this is the difference between a company doing something good because it’s a good thing to do and a company using a disaster to get attention. There is a respect for the people going through the disaster in the former, and it is something that Microsoft neglected.

As PR professionals I think it’s important for us to think about whether what we do is respecting the people we’re interacting with or if we are taking advantage of them.

How to Use Social Media Expertly, Plus Beer

Twitter can be a great tool for a company, but there are also many ways, if used wrong, in which it hurts an organization too. One recent incident that shows how a mis-tweet should be handled is the Red Cross and Dogfish Head Brewery interaction.

Dogfish Head Midas Touch, the favorite beer of the Red Cross

CNNmoney reported that a Red Cross employee sent out a personal tweet ("Ryan found two more 4 bottle packs of Dogfish Head's Midas Touch beer...when we drink we do it right #gettngslizzerd.") from the Official Red Cross Twitter page. While it isn’t something a non-profit wants on their Twitter page, it wasn’t the end of the world. They deleted it and apologized in a comedic way. Case closed, or it would have been if Dogfish Head hadn’t stepped in.

One of my classmates wrote about the Red Cross’ response, but I’d like to focus on Dogfish Head’s actions after they found out about the tweet. It was reported that fans of the beer started a donation campaign using #gettngslizzerd. Dogfish’s social media team found out about the tweet and decided to join in with beer-for-blood deals at places where their beer is sold.

Dogfish Head Brewery did a great thing. They aren’t a large company and because of that they can’t reach the people that the Red Cross can, but by finding an opportunity in a mistake and using that to reach people and do something positive they’ve made their presence known in a big way.

Both of these companies handled this incident expertly. The Red Cross has created a unique giving page for all the #gettngslizzerd supporters and Dogfish Head is still interacting with their customers through all forms of social media. More companies should follow their example.

Social Media Skills Young PR Pros Need

Mark Ragan, CEO of Ragan Communications, asks Tom Fishman, MTV's manager of social media & community, and Jon Bellinger, VP of social media strategy at Ketchum Inc., what important skills young PR professionals need when using social media.

http://www.ragan.com/Main/Video/1504.aspx

The biggest take away from this video for me is the importance of integrating yourself into a community. Knowing how members act and prefer to interact with companies is vital. Using those communities as only a convenient tool isn’t a good way to share a message, we can all see through those lazy tactics. But creating a real dialog and collaboration with those community members can lead to great results.

The best way to integrate a message into these communities is to know how they work and what actions are seen as acceptable and which ones step over the line. Once this is made clear it’s easier to work with people from those communities and know how a brand can fit in with them.

Another upside of this is that now I have a good excuse for all the time that will be wasted on various sites instead of doing work. I’m not procrastinating; I’m studying online communities.