When I began this program, I set goals for myself. I knew I would be taking classes part-time, in addition to working full-time and all of the other obligations that make up life. I didn’t want to just complete the courses, I wanted to excel in them. If I was going to make this my career, I should at least enjoy learning about it. I set two goals for myself: complete the program within four consecutive terms, and achieve a 4.0 GPA.

Today I officially achieved both goals. Final marks were released for the two classes I was taking this term (my fourth) bringing my GPA to 4.08. I have completed Ryerson’s PR program, and will attending the convocation on June 9th!

From January 2008 to April 2009 I worked hard to achieve my goals, but I would not have had any success without the help of many people along the way. I would like to take this opportunity to thank some of the PR instructors, social media personalities and PR professionals that have helped me. Thank you to:

Irene Tysall

Susan McDougall

Joe Lewis

Bob Cooper

Phyllis Bennett

Lauren Wolff

Boyd Neil

Alan Chumley

Nick Douloff

Anne Grady

David Jones

Terry Fallis

Chris Clarke

Judy Gombita

And to all the other PR & Communications professionals that have offered guidance along the way. Each of you have provided valuable insight and guidance, and I appreciate all the help that you have given. Thank you, and I hope our paths cross again in the future!

This debate stems from a shift in media, and in the way we gather information. The ideas of truth and authority have fundamentally changed from the way we used to treat them.

In the past, the mainstream media was viewed as the primary source of truth. The news, as reported by newspapers or television, was the authority on what was happening. There were a few different sources of information, but most of them stuck to a reasonable journalistic standard.

Fast forward to now; media is abundant and everywhere. Blogs are breaking news faster than traditional media, the 24/7 news cycle still isn’t enough for some, and everyone has access to their own personal soapbox.

It’s not that traditional media isn’t seen as a source of truth, or doesn’t have authority. People still trust the media giants for their news. I personally visit thestar.com and theglobeandmail.com just as frequently as I visit various other blogs and online information sources. And that’s the difference. The ideas of truth and authority have shifted from a few centralized sources of information to an unlimited amount of inputs. Truth is now a collection of information, and authority is now a relative scale.

People now draw their conclusions based upon their own personal collection of information sources. The newspapers, their favourite TV anchor, late night political shows like The Daily Show, Colbert, or The Hour, an industry blogger, a nut job blogger, company websites, facebook rumours, twitter feeds, and many more fragments of information all give their inputs. What the individual believes will be a pastiche of all the pieces they’ve collected.

Authority of one source is now relative to all the others. No one source is absolute. For example, the daily newspaper still holds authority as a trusted and reputable provider of facts. It may have a bigger say in the final belief of the individual, but it won’t have the only say. How much each input is valued is based entirely upon the individual. Some sources are trusted more than others, and this scale can vary completely from person to person.

Truth and authority have shifted from a focused stream coming from monolithic sources to a collection of fragments pieced together differently by each individual.

What does this mean for PR and for companies? I think it’s good news. Everybody can make their voice heard in the new media environment, including companies. Every company can – and should – tell their story directly to their stakeholders. It won’t be the only story the stakeholders hear, but neither will what anyone else is saying. The big mistake here is to stay silent. It’s an even bigger mistake to ignore the other stories being told.

People’s ideas or beliefs cannot be controlled. They can only be influenced, and they will be influenced. The only options for organizations are now to be a voice among the influences, or to stay out of the chorus completely.

Now, on to some content. Public Relations is largely about reputation - maintaining it, improving it or establishing it. Reputation will definitely be a big theme in my studies this term, so I thought I would look at a few quick ideas about reputation and Public Relations.

1. Reputation will have substantial influence on business results.

This is probably obvious, but it’s a point worth making just to illustrate the many ways reputation can aid a bottom line. Financial analysts take reputation into account when valuing investment opportunities, especially the reputation of those in charge. A poor reputation will have a direct impact on share price or the valuation of an organization.

It can hurt sales at the consumer level as well. Reputation for quality (or lack thereof) can make or break a company. The auto industry is a perfect example; Toyota and Honda continually sell more vehicles than their American competitors here in Canada, despite higher price tags. A Toyota or Honda will keep its value for years, based primarily on a reputation for longevity and quality. Meanwhile, American car companies like GM and Chrysler are struggling to survive, and their poor reputation isn’t helping any.

Reputation also plays a large role in recruiting. Attracting talented employees, and retaining them, is a key focus of successful organizations. Reputation goes a long way when recruiting. A recent study by Hill & Knowlton found that “three out of four MBA students say that corporate reputation plays an extremely or very important role when considering where to work.” (reference)

So it’s important, we get it, but how do we define it? I still favour Marcel Lebrun’s explanation, though I’m substituting Brand for Reputation here:

2. Reputation is the sum of conversations about your organization.

Reputation will include all elements of your company, not just what is churned out by the Marketing or PR departments. Nike, for example, is constantly creating stunning advertisements and sponsors some of the greatest athletes around the world. It also frequently invests in charitable organizations and supports many youth programs. However, part of their reputation still includes South East Asian children working in sweatshops. Why? There is a public perception that Nike makes products that way. Is it true? I don’t know, but the truth of it is irrelevant. What people believe shapes reputation, and reputation shapes business results.

So how can we manage reputation? I’ll be learning a lot more about this in the coming months, which I’ll be sure to post, but in the meantime here are some initial ideas:

• Listen

Knowing your own reputation is a crucial step. Identifying the gap between your self perception and your reputation will immediately identify where the work needs to be done.

• Engage your stakeholders

This can be done in any number of ways. Reputation is essentially the flow of stories about your organization, so communication and dialogue are vital allies.

• Invest in and inform your employees

Every single employee of an organization is a flag bearer for the organization’s reputation. Investing in employees not only improves performance, but also reputation. Communicating to and through employees keeps positive stories circulating. Keep employees out of the loop and you’re at the mercy of the rumour mill. 

• Listen again

Reputation is always changing, so keep that ear to the ground!

So there’s a quick rundown of reputation and its importance. It’s a good primer for the detailed analysis I’ll have to be doing in the next few months. If you have any comments or would like to further the discussion, please leave a comment below! Thanks for reading!

There is a LOT going on over those two days, so I was sure to take a look at the schedule to make a plan. Below are the seminars I intend to attend, and why. I won’t be live twittering or blogging during these events either,  I would rather pay attention and enjoy it. I will be sure to take notes and blog afterwards! Feel free to say hi if you see me there! 

May 21

1:30pm –  Podcasting Workshop with David Jones and Doug Walker: I don’t know if I’ll ever produce a podcast, but if this presentation is anything like Shill, it’s a must see.

2:50pm – Digital Activism with Michael Geist: This promises to be an excellent presentation. Geist’s columns are always compelling and interesting, and he definitely knows what he’s talking about.

4:10pm – It’s a toss up between  Private vs. Public or Government 2.0, from Community Participation to Co-creation. Both topics are interesting and intriguing. Any suggestions or recommendations? Let me know! Otherwise, I’ll probably make a game-time decision.

May 22

1:30pm – Measuring Social Media: I’m really looking forward to this seminar. It features, among others, Alan Chumley and KD Paine, two giants of PR and media measurement. I’m highly interested in measurement, so this seminar promises to be one of the highlights of Mesh. It was just announced that Third Tuesday will discuss “How do we measure social media” the night before Mesh, so if you don’t have your mesh tickets, you can get a preview of sorts for free. Hopefully I will be at both!

2:50pm – Building a Brand on the Web: Always a great topic for PR, especially for MarComm or agency work. Plus it has a great group of participants, including Maggie Fox of Social Media Group.

4:10pm – Reputation Monitoring and Management: Another great PR topic, one of the most important aspects of PR in my opinion.  A good finale after two days of seminars.

So there it is! My schedule for Mesh 08. If you don’t already have tickets, bad news, they’re all sold out. Is there any social media scalping going on? Hope to see you there!

The debate between Public Relations and Marketing rages on, and seems to intensify as the line between the two gets blurrier. PR is increasingly used for commercial products and improving sales, while Marketing branches out into new tactics as traditional advertising grows stale. Both PR and Marketing are quickly branching out to social media, and finding new ways to fit it into their strategies. So the question keeps arising, who is better fit for social media, PR or Marketing? Here are my two cents.

I’m not going to go into too much detail about social media; we’ve already heard it all before. It’s about two-way communication, dialogue and relationships. Whichever group understands the nature of social media best will certainly prosper, whether they are from PR or Marketing. But at their cores, which discipline is more suitable for this medium?

Public Relations is based on relationships and reputation. Though it has proven useful to the bottom line, the essence of PR is not based on commercialism. It’s as much about listening to important stakeholders as it is about telling your organization’s story to those stakeholders. PR is meant to be the bridge of an organization to the people that the organization affects.

Marketing is based on transactions. It’s about creating and selling products to consumers. There are many inventive ways to do this, but at its core, this is Marketing’s strength and limit.

In my opinion, Public Relations definitely has the advantage here. Social media is about communication and conversation, first and foremost. Engaging in conversation and creating relationships is what social media and Public Relations are founded on. Many important elements of Public Relations aren’t about increasing sales or revenue, and it is these elements specifically that can thrive through social media. Relationship and reputation building, issues management, monitoring and engaging with public opinion and maintaining legitimacy and relevance are just a few ways that PR can use social media without using a transactional model. Social media isn’t based on transactions, and purely commercial interests in this space are often met with public backlash. Especially when advertising tries to mask itself as transparent conversation.

I know this comes as a surprise. The “PR for the People” Blog says PR is suited to social media! Shocking! But here’s the issue I really wanted to get to. How do successful PR practitioners pitch these non-transactional efforts to clients or managers? I thoroughly believe that in order for PR to gain the respect it deserves it must have measurable impact, must relate specifically to fiscal goals and maintain a healthy ROI. How are relationships measured? How can one measure the impact of a PR plan designed to engage the community and build reputation? I understand the importance of using an open system approach, rather than a closed one, and how Public Relations can do just that through interacting with stakeholders. But how does one put a dollar sign on that interaction?

If you have the answers, or just have an opinion you would like to share, please leave a comment! Thanks for reading.

While I was absent from my RSS reader, Onedegree added me to their blogroll! I only realized thanks to a healthy spike in site traffic. I’m honoured, many thanks to everyone over there. Full disclosure: there was an open call for the blogroll, and I applied, but I’m still happy to have made the cut.

Now on to some actual content. While researching and writing a final project for a PR class, I found a quote about Issues Management that I think is really poignant. It was in a textbook, but it can also be found on the Issues Management Council’s website. It defines Issues Management as:

“Closing the gap between corporate action and stakeholder expectation.”

I think this quote is really appropriate for Public Relations in general as well, and if you exchange “corporate” for the organization you represent, it’s a great one-line definition for a lot of communications work. It implies the two-way communication model and bridging role that PR tries to embody. It’s not about influencing stakeholder expectation to suit corporate needs, it’s about listening to those stakeholders and working as a mediator between the two. At times that will mean adapting the organization to suit the stakeholders/publics, as much as companies may be loathe to do so.

This is one of those things that I love about PR. It’s not based on pushing products or transactions. It’s about relationships and cultures. It’s about Real People.

More to come about transactions vs. relationships in the near future! Thanks for reading.

It begins with some sobering facts about PR during the last economic slowdown. Full service firms faced 30% declines in revenues, while technology boutiques closed their doors for good. It makes me wonder about the current wave of technology boutiques. There are a handful of social media boutique shops around these days, and I wonder if a slow economic market will shut them down, or perhaps force them to amalgamate into the larger PR or marketing firms. On the other hand, perhaps they will do more business as companies look for innovative and affordable ways to engage their customers and stakeholders? I hope the latter is true, but the former seems more likely to me.

Edelman’s first two points especially ring true for me. Traditional marketing is becoming less effective every day.

His final point and example are good indicators of both Marketing and PR working in new ways to reach people. He references the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, an Edelman affair, part of which (or related to?) is the Ogilvy “Dove Evolution” video, which was produced right here in Toronto. Both have a similar message, but with different tactics, and both have been very successful.

So check out the link, it’s an excellent read! Hat tip to Stephen Davies, who sent the link through Twitter.

One key theme we did touch on is the importance of measuring outcomes instead of outputs. In my opinion, this seems to be a recurring theme in PR measurement, and a common problem.

Many PR metrics focus on the quantity of what is produced, and who may or may not see it. For example, how many clips did our press release generate? How many successful pitches did we have? What was the reach of our publicity? These are great to measure within a communication plan, but fail to evaluate the success of a plan.

In the past, Ad Value Equivalencies were a common metric for PR success. How much “free” press did we generate, and how much would that have cost us if it were an ad? Add a few multipliers to beef it up, show it to management, then ask for an increased budget. This has widely been discredited as a flawed measurement system. It doesn’t correlate to any impact on the audience, and eyeballs do not equate to action from targeted stakeholders.

AVEs are a measurement of output. To me, it’s basically a measurement of what the PR staff has been up to. It measures what you’re doing, but not how you’re doing. In a sports analogy, you’re measuring the shots taken, not the points on the board.

The trouble is that this type of measurement seems to be returning when it comes to social media. There is a lot of talk about how many hits are generated. How many subscribers are on the corporate blog, how many views did our viral video get, how big is our facebook group? These are convenient metrics, because like AVEs, they are easy to measure. In actuality, they’re not going to measure any success; they will only measure the distribution of your tactics.

Hits, subscribers, friends and tags are all the same as AVEs from a measurement standpoint. They measure dissemination, not change in opinion, impact or action. They measure outputs, not outcomes.

PR needs to be very critical of its own work. If we hope to be effective counselors, we need to demonstrate substantial impact in our audiences, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Measurement should be about improving reputation and/or increasing ROI, rather than tallying eyeballs.

In reality, I’m sure PR budgets would be cut a bit, or remain the same, hiring would slow down, all the usual impacts a recession has. But let’s take a look at some key practice areas of PR, and how I think they can play a pivotal role in a tight economy.

MarComm: I figured I would start here since this is such a common area of PR. If times are tight, I would advocate using public relations over marketing. You can accomplish a lot with a very small PR budget, through publicity, creativity and good relationships with your community. Traditional marketing can get costly, ad space doesn’t come cheap.

Investor Relations: If your stock is falling, or your business isn’t getting the returns it used to, the investors are going to want some serious reassurance. Investor relations should be a crucial facet of any business in a recession. If your ROI is coming back red, and your company remains silent, investors will be dropping out faster than Rudy Giuliani. If you employ some excellent IR, you can maintain their trust and hopefully keep them on board.

Internal Communications: I personally consider this to be the most important function of any company. Productivity and profit are directly linked to how engaged, enabled and happy the employees are. Nothing puts more strain on employee relations than a recession. Potential layoffs, salary increases and bonuses getting the axe, terms like “restructuring” being tossed around, it’s a time of high anxiety for everyone. A good internal communications plan can diffuse the tension, reassure doubts, or at the very least, keep people in the loop about what’s happening.

So there are three key areas PR can really aid a company when the chips are down. This is just my opinion, during the last recession of the early 90s I had a paper route, so I’m not speaking from experience. What do you think? If you have worked in PR through a recession, or just want to share your opinion, leave your two cents in the comments below. Thanks for reading!

Take a moment to read the link if you haven’t, it’s an interesting read. It’s basically a DIY checklist to rack up as many Youtube views as possible, by any means necessary. Some of his points are great suggestions, such as designing videos for remixing and releasing all videos simultaneously, both great ideas to draw people in deeper once they make first contact. Unfortunately, the rest of his methods range from the ethical grey area to the downright dirty. Here are some quick highlights:

• Reaching out to individuals who run relevant blogs and paying them to post embedded videos.
• Spamming friend lists through email and facebook with the latest client’s video
• Having various employees make posts under pseudonyms. Then having these employees (under their false identities) create debates and arguments to try and create controversy

He seems very proud of all of these, and gives a bunch of stats to pat himself and his company, The Comotion Group, on their backs. He has since done some serious backpedalling, but the damage has been done. To quote The Tragically Hip, nobody is interested in something you didn’t do.

So that’s the backstory, but here’s the part that I take issue with. He closes his first post with the line “my advice: fire your PR firm and do it yourself.” Woah buddy, slow it down.

Maybe that’s not such a bad idea? If you plan on acting unethically to drive up your Youtube views, you’re not going to want a PR firm around because they’ll be the first to tell you it’s a terrible idea. If you’re lucky, they might just quit on their own! Personally, if these were my social media tactics, I would employ two PR firms, because if this kind of activity got linked to my company’s name I would need all the help I could get.

What he’s overlooking is the fundamental difference between Public Relations and Marketing. There can be a lot of overlap, but PR at its core is about relationships and reputation. Getting out a client’s corporate message or vision is certainly part of that, but it is a mean, not an end. PR is about a client’s relationship with the people it deals with, be they customers, their own clients, or potentially interested groups. If you build something meaningful with the customer, they will respond favourably on their own. This is why social media is such a boon for PR, it can be used to create meaningful interactions between people that can create working relationships. Youtube isn’t about how many people see a video, it’s about how many people will still care when they’re done viewing it.

Deceit and payoffs are nothing new, but they have never been a substitute for good PR.