Lessons Learned at the Advanced PR Technology Conference

“It’s not social media if the rest of the PR industry isn’t socializing…”

I was a last-minute invite to the Bulldog Reporter Advanced PR Technology in Practice event in San Francisco recently to discuss Social Media and successful examples in today’s PR landscape.I joined Sally Falkow, a fellow Social Media Club member, and Eric Schwartzman, on the “Brave New World of Social Media” panel.

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Robert Scoble Interview from Social Media to Corporate Media

Video Series #2 - Robert Scoble 

The Social Media Club event, from Social Media to Corporate Media, was created for CMOs, VPs, Marketing Directors, and Directors of Communications who are trying to engage with customers, potential customers and/or stakeholders.There are two primary components to successfully engaging with Social Media on behalf of your organization - strategy and tactics. This short video series captures a few of the highlights from the event. Thanks to Alison McNeill for putting these together.Video Two - Robert Scoble (click here if the video doesn’t appear below.)

The series includes some very important interviews with those truly behind the evolution of Social Media, including Jeremiah Owyang, Chris Heuer, and Chris Carfi.

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From Social Media to Corporate Media Video Series #1

The Social Media Club event, from Social Media to Corporate Media, was created for CMOs, VPs, Marketing Directors, and Directors of Communications who are trying to engage with customers, potential customers and/or stakeholders.

There are two primary components to successfully engaging with Social Media on behalf of your organization - strategy and tactics. This short video series captures a few of the highlights from the event. Thanks to Alison McNeill for putting these together.

There are some very important interviews with those truly behind the evolution of Social Media and its influence on marketing, PR and advertising, including Robert Scoble, Jeremiah Owyang, Chris Heuer, and Chris Carfi. I’ll run this over the next couple of days, so enjoy!

Video One - Setting the Stage Brian Solis and Chris Heuer (click here if the video doesn’t appear below.)

Feel free to forward passed my intro directly to Chris’ welcome speech. Tags: chris+carfi chriscarfi chris+heuer chrisheuer robert+scoble robertscoble podtech futureworks fwpr briansolis brian+solis socialmedia social+media sm2cm media siliconvalley+2.0 siliconvalley2.0

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From Social Media to Corporate Media - SM2CM

It’s easy to get caught up in the rapidly evolving world of social media and sometimes I have to stop and remember that there’s a whole other world out there that thinks social media is a group of friendly journalists.

Over the last several months I have had the opportunity to help start and participate in the Social Media Club along with Chris Heuer. In the last six months, I have learned more than I have in practicing traditional PR for years. It’s one thing to practice it in your own bubble, but it’s another to learn and share with each other; and that’s the point of Social Media Club, “If you get it, share it.”

On 10/23, we held our first event, From Social Media to Corporate Media at the SAP offices in Palo Alto.

Social Media Club was formed to help share all things social media and how it applies and benefits the world of marketing communications.

The goals are simple:

Promote media literacy – production and consumption

Promote ethics and standards

Share best practices around the emerging area of Social Media

Chris Heuer kicked things off with a profound assessment, “There is more wisdom in the room than what stands in front of you. And it’s this collection of shared wisdom that will help us collectively learn.”

He quickly reviewed the differences between strategy and tactics, as keynote Robert Scoble was focusing on SM Strategy and co-keynote, Lisa Stone of BlogHer discussed SM tactics.

So to recap, strategy is about goals and the plans to reach those goals and tactics are the activities and attitudes to execute.

So what does from SM2CM mean? The cost of production has dramatically reduced the price of admission, which is opening the door for the masses to produce and share content on their own.

If you look at the Cluetrain mantra that says “markets are conversations,” then it has definitely been manifested in the form of social media. Social media represents the opportunity to engage with customers, potential, stakeholders, employees and anyone else that shares relevant content. In the corporate world, businesses can apply social media in the form of blogs, podcasts and video blogs.

Why? Because it opens up the corporate kimono and allows customers and company executives to enter a forum of productive dialogue. Transparency is the new honesty - instead of its old meaning, hollow or fake - and at the root of social media, we’re quickly learning that we don’t market “to” anymore, we “talk” with those who make up the market.

It’s about being human and being connected.

According to Heuer, “you can’t manage micro segments in the long tail.” He’s right. The segment manages itself, although you can do your part to reach them using SM tools that interact with them directly or with those around them.

In today’s social media world, it’s all about people and listening. Participation is marketing nowadays, and the goal is not to focus all efforts on controlling the message, but simply trying to be part of the conversations that are taking place with or without you.Again, listening is more important than talking.

True engagement is genuine and value driven, and not focused on sales! To reference Heuer, it is the “because of” effect. I’m here “because of” my desire to learn about social media. I purchased your service, “because of” my trust in the company’s honest and open door communications policy. Remember, as social media marketers, we’re not here to sell, we’re here to share and we’re also here to listen to our customers.

So, coming back to social media and what it means to corporate media…

By integrating social media tools, we can reach our customers in a whole new way that also encourages them to in turn, socialize your company and its products/services. It’s all about opening up channels to listen, participate, and befriend and help markets.

More to come…

For additional coverage on the SM2CM event, please visit Jeremiah Owyang and Giovanni Rodriguez.

For more pictures, jump to one of the several SM2CM flickr streams. Additional Social Media Club event pictures, including a collective repository of pix from SM2CM, are also available here.

Tags: socialmediaclub chrisheuer briansolis futureworks robertscoble lisastone blogher pr pr2.0 publicrelations sm2cm giovannirodriguez

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From Social Media to Corporate Media, An interactive workshop for high tech communications professionals

Our news release regarding ”From Social Media to Corporate Media” crossed PR Newswire this morning.  The event is around the corner, so we hope to see you there!

Here’s the release:

PALO ALTO, CALIF. 10/17/06 – Social Media Club today announced its first workshop for high tech communications professionals.  On October 23^rd, From Social Media to Corporate Media (SM2CM), will offer an interactive workshop for high tech communications, PR, and advertising professionals to better understand Social Media.  SM2CM will be held in SAPs conference center in Palo Alto from 1 to 6 p.m.

This workshop is a unique hybrid of a traditional conference and an unconference. During the course of the afternoon on, attendees will hear short talks from leading Social Media practitioners and engage in conversations with other Silicon Valley professionals, leaving the workshop with an understanding of how their company can benefit from producing Corporate Media using Social Media tools.

The event has an all-star line-up consisting of those helping to define the Social Media landscape, including:

Robert Scoble, PodTech.net

Lisa Stone, co-founder of blogher 

Giovanni Rodriguez, co-founder of Hubbub 

Chris Heuer, Social Media Club and BrainJams.org

After the workshop, participants are encouraged to stay for an evening cocktail reception hosted by SAP and Social Media Club.  Registration costs $150, which includes the reception. For those unable to attend the workshop, tickets for the reception are available for only $25.

Chris Heuer, founder of Social Media Club, observed, “Social Media is already a critical component in some of the most effective communications strategies, and those who get it will far outpace those who don’t.  If you are a Communications Professional in Silicon Valley, this is exactly the sort of opportunity you have been seeking to learn all about Social Media Strategy and Tactics.”

Links

SM2CM - http://www.socialmediaclub.com/sm2cm/

Purchase tickets - http://www.eventbrite.com/event/37277498

Social Media Club - http://www.socialmediaclub.com

Why attend - http://www.socialmediaclub.com/sm2cm/?p=5

Robert Scoble - http://scobelizer.wordpress.com/

Lisa Stone - http://surfette.typepad.com/

Giovanni Rodriguez - http://hubbub.typepad.com/blog/

Chris Heuer – BrianJams and SocialMediaClub

Brian Solis – FutureWorks and PR 2.0

The event is sponsored by PR Newswire, Fleishman Hillard, and SAP.

If your company is interested in sponsoring the workshop and joining as one of the first members of Social Media Club’s Founders Circle, please contact SMC.

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Social Media Club Forms Working Group to Develop New Standard for Press Release

On the heels of its official launch, Social Media Club (SMC) formed the Media Release Working Group to begin development of the hRelease, a new standard for modernizing the traditional press release for a Web-centric world.

The Media Release Working Group will work closely with the Microformats community, while evaluating other technologies such as XPRL, XBRL, and NewsML to establish a standard way of organizing, tagging, distributing, and sharing ‘official’ organizational communications among blogs and other online communities.  The group intends to present an initial draft specification on November 2nd at the Society for New Communications Research Symposium in Boston. 

Current members include:
·         Chris Heuer, Social Media Club
·         Brian Solis, FutureWorks and PR2.0
·         Tom Foremski, SiliconValleyWatcher
·         Mark Nolan, PR Newswire
·         Laura Sturaitis, BusinessWire
·         Bill Accola, Marketwire
·         Todd Defren, SHIFT Communications and PR Squared
·         Jen McClure, Society for New Communications Research
·         Jason Baptiste, TheWeblogWire
·         Todd Van Hoosear, Topaz Partners
·         Sally Falkow, Falkow, Inc.
·         Darin Wolter, Marketwire

According to Heuer, “The Media Release Working Group is the first tactical step of this increasingly important initiative.  This working group is dedicated to addressing the industry’s concerns with the existing press release format while maximizing the value of news content for an Internet-driven world.  We are striving to create a standard that everyone can support by including every stakeholder group’s perspective and we aim to make significant progress before the end of the year.”

Brian Solis who is on the Social Media Club Advisory Board and a member of the working group added, “This is a very important initiative as many view the traditional press release as only scratching the surface of its potential value within the emerging, and increasingly influential, online media movement.  We will work with some of the industry’s most prominent players that are involved in the press release process every step of the way, to help create a proposed new standard for industry-wide adoption.”

The effort is inspired in part by working group members, including Tom Foremski, who, in his original blog post, proclaimed “Die! Press Release! Die! Die! Die!,” and by Todd Defren of SHIFT Communications, who offered the first example of a “social media” press release.
“The Society for New Communications Research is very pleased to be a partner in this important industry-wide initiative,” stated Jen McClure, executive director, Society for New Communications Research. “We are confident that by bringing together a wide range of participants in this collaborative effort, we will successfully develop a standard that will benefit organizations, professional communicators, traditional journalists, bloggers and social media practitioners, media companies and their audiences.” 

The goal for the working group is to include at least 1-2 members from the different stakeholder groups that include: journalists, news wires, editors, public relations, bloggers, podcasters, academics, and technology specialists.

To follow the developments of this group, or get involved, the New Media Release Google Group hosts real-time discussions of the future of the Press Release. Interested parties may also write blog posts or identify relevant articles with the tag ‘hRelease.’ The working group will document its progress in the the hRelease Wiki donated by SocialText.  There is also a weekly NMR (New Media Release) discussion hosted by Shel Holtz on his award-winning For Immediate Release (FIR) podcast.

The Media Release Working Group will hold its first meeting on September 14^th via a Skype conference call.

Links:
Social Media Club - http://www.socialmediaclub.org
Social Media Club Membership - http://www.socialmediaclub.org/about/membership/
New Media Release Google Group - http://groups.google.com/group/newmediarelease
hRelease Wiki - http://www.socialtext.net/hrelease/index.cgi
For Immediate Release NMR podcasts - http://www.forimmediaterelease.biz
Todd Defren’s Social Media Press Release template - http://www.shiftcomm.com/downloads/smprtemplate.pdf 

About SMC
SocialMediaClub.org is an association of amateur and professional social media practitioners that are committed to sharing best practices, supporting ethics and standards, and promoting media literacy.  Social Media Club was founded by Chris Heuer, serial Internet entrepreneur and Chairman of the not-for-profit BrainJams.org.

Technorati Tags: hrelease, Social Media, socialmediaclub, Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher, Howard Greenstein, Sally Falkow, Chris Heuer, Brian Solis, brainjams, futureworks, PR2.0, Jen McCluer SNCR, todd defren, shift, pr-squared, Todd Van Hoosear, topaz partners, Jason Baptiste, theweblogwire, Laura Sturaitis, businesswire, microformat, businesswire, prnewswire, sally falkow, pr, public relations, marketwire, Darin Wolter

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Auburn University’s Robert French Develops New Process for Social Media Press Releases

Social Media Club is about sharing new information and highlighting advancements and best practices in our industry.  I wanted to take a moment to recognize the efforts made by Robert French recently around the Social Media Press Release (SMPR) movement.

Robert French runs InfoOpinons?, a blog that was created to help him, and his PR students at Auburn University, learn together. He says in his bio, “None of us pretends to know everything and we’ll likely learn from you.  We blog in our classes. It is all about becoming familiar with Word-of-Mouth (WOM) or WOMM, Word-of-Mouth Marketing.”

Recently, French introduced a process through which students may practice creating versions of Todd Defren’s social media press release template.

For their Fall classes, French has created a new site: The Loveliest Village Newsroom. This is part of a larger site where students will be posting news and feature stories they will write and produce (audio and video) during the semester. The Loveliest Village utilizes blogs, a wiki, Flickr, del.icio.us and is intended to provide experiential learning.

In June, I wrote a post, “Colleges Send Marketing/PR Graduates to Workforce Ill-Prepared,” which basically discussed exactly what the headline implies. I’ve hired far too many PR graduates who were not adequately prepared for the day-to-day regiment of a PR career.  French is one of many educators looking to change that…

We at Social Media Club applaud Robert French.  His actions here will echo far beyond the SMPR.  His students will achieve greater success after graduation because of his dedication to education and his passion for embracing new technologies as part of the PR craft.

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SocialMediaClub.org to Build a Community for Social Media Professionals

It’s official! The SMC launch press release is crossing the wire as I type this post.

SocialMediaClub.org (SMC) launched today for the purpose of elevating Social Media to a higher level of professionalism. The organization will bring together different groups of social media practitioners such as bloggers, podcasters, publishers, journalists, students, artists, developers, marketers, and PR professionals.

SocialMediaClub.org was formed for the purpose of sharing best practices, establishing ethics and standards, and promoting media literacy around the emerging area of Social Media. SMC was founded by Chris Heuer, serial Internet entrepreneur and executive director of the not-for-profit BrainJams.org.

According to Heuer, “This is the beginning of a global conversation about building an organization and a community where the many diverse groups of people who care about social media can come together to discover, connect, share, and learn.”

Today, SMC is hosting its inaugural event in Silicon Valley to organize its first local chapter and to begin work on the hRelease, a Microformat standard for modernizing the traditional press release for a Web-centric world. The New Media Release Google Group was established in June to discuss the future of the Press Release among PR professionals and other interested stakeholders. The meeting will move the efforts from its initial discussions, as outlined on the hRelease Wiki donated by SocialText, to deliver the initial draft of the Microformat.

Since the launch of its blog one month ago, SMC has received tremendous industry support which has enabled Heuer to expand the team with prominent industry veterans including, Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher, Howard Greenstein, one of the co-founders of the WWWAC List, Internet visionary Mitch Ratcliffe, Brian Solis, founder of FutureWorks, Inc. and PR2.0, Sally Falkow, president of Expansion Plus and Falkow, Inc. and in-demand speaker and author, angel advisor Timothy Taylor of Taylor, Inc., Jennifer McClure of SNCR, and many other leaders of this emerging industry.

SMC will also host several Founders Circle Events with the first series planned for New York City, London, Miami, Washington D.C., San Francisco, Toronto, Seattle, and Los Angeles. The half day BrainJams-styled unconferences will focus on “The Rise of Social Media” and the specific needs of each local community for establishing a local chapter of Social Media Club.

Heuer adds, “The path towards the transformation of Social Media Club from an idea and a blog into a real world community is paved with unconferences and blog posts tagged with socialmediaclub!”

The idea for Social Media Club originated in the Fall of 2005 with the Web 2point1 BrainJam. This led Heuer and his fiancée Kristie Wells to create the non-profit BrainJams organization to promote unconferences and ad-hoc collaboration to a broader audience of less technical professionals. Over the last year, BrainJams has brought together like-minded people from different backgrounds for hosted conversations about the things that matter most to participants. As a result of thousands of conversations since, the team discovered that Social Media was their true passion and deserved to be the focus of their efforts.

Heuer continued, “We are more than just USERS, we are the reason the tools exist - we are the people who communicate our thoughts and ideas near and far. By enabling the people who ‘get it’ to share it with others through programs like Adopt A Blogger, Social Tagging Project and dScribes, we believe that everyone touched by this industry will benefit from our efforts.”

BrainJams was established to expand the unconference movement and experiment with different formats for group conversations and social learning. In addition to promoting what is now known as “12 Five Minute Meetings” (speed dating styled networking), BrianJams also promotes “Rent an Expert” and other forms of unconferences such as the National Coalition for Deliberation and Dialogue.

Event details:
Social Media Club Meeting #1
Begins: Wed, 16 Aug 2006 at 6:00 PM
Location: 857 Maude Avenue, Mountain View, CA 94043
Tags: hrelease, Social Media, socialmediaclub, Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher, Howard Greenstein, Sally Falkow, Chris Heuer, Kristie Wells, Brian Solis, Constantin Basturea, socialmedia, brainjams, futureworks, PR2.0, Jennifer McClure

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