ARTICULATED

Last year I joined the board of directors of a national nonprofit organization that has a $35,000/year “give or get” for its board members. That means that I am committed to raising or producing $35K in gifts to the organization annually.

Taking on an obligation like that becomes a BIG item on the annual to-do list. I’m not one to ask my friends and family for money for my causes. And to reach that high bar by hitting up my drinking buddies for $100 each, I’d have to collect 350 checks annually. That’s nearly one a day. But I already have a job.

By contrast, I’m pretty comfortable making my case to foundations and corporations with whom there are some natural synergies. That’s probably the P.R. guy in me. Going that route is still a time-consuming piece of volunteer work, but pursuing money in $10K or $30K increments gets one to $35K much faster.

This year, I’ve already raised $25K. (Thank you, friends who were involved — you know who you are.)  I’m leading a contingent to Houston this afternoon to make a great big ask of a Fortune 500 company. I should receive word in August about a $15K request being considered by a Colorado-based charitable foundation. This flurry of activity could produce zilch. Nonetheless I’m feeling pretty good at this moment.

Of the money I’m raising, nearly 90% of it goes to program. And I believe it’s very good and important program. But I’ve lately discovered a more selfish motivation for spending my time this way. My line of work is P.R., and I have no desire to change that. But I figure, if I really sharpen my fundraising skills, I’ll always be able to find a paying gig.

(Photo courtesy of Nathan Gibbs via a Flickr Creative Commons license.)

I’m a proposal-writing machine lately. Until two Fridays ago, I had not responded to a request for proposal (RFP) in easily two years. Surprisingly the proposal I submitted that day made the cut in the prospective client’s search.  So feeling encouraged, I responded to a second RFP this past Friday – probably a full-blown cattle call, with every PR agency in Denver in the mix. It was a doozy – a huge, detailed request that required what turned out to be 56 pages of response. I debated and procrastinated. Then I wrote and edited and rewrote. Then I gathered and sorted and compiled and collated. Then I put all seven copies of the 56 proposal in this pretty white box, put this nice label on it, and delivered it 45 minutes before the 4pm deadline. Then I had a beer.

Back in March, I confessed my regret over a posture I maintained through most of a recently ended client relationship. I named my guilt for doing something fairly unlike me – keeping quiet some potentially disruptive ideas about where the client really should have been investing its marketing resources. In the name of avoiding conflict with my primary contact at that company, I maintained silence. As it turns out, that did none of us a bit of good. I said never again.

Fast forward to recently, when Kinkennon Communications received an RFP from an organization I’d love to work for. Unfortunately, my thoughts about how the prospective client should approach its public relations challenge, and the approach suggested in the RFP, were a bit out of synch. The modus operandi in these proposal situations is to say the right things so your firm gets hired. But with “never again” fresh on my mind, and a general distaste for hypocrisy, I decided I’d better go ahead and say what I think … even if I was pretty certain it would result in Kinkennon Communications’ proposal going directly to the trash.

Wouldn’t you know it, they’ve called me in for the next round. I may find myself in front of a firing squad. But it would be an honor to help this group, so –- at the moment -– I’m feeling pretty good.

I’ve increasingly taken to poking gentle fun at the Twitterati – the PR and marketing pros who spend their days on Twitter tweeting to one another about their iPhones and Twitter. They are pejoratively known as “new media douchebags.”  Certain kinds of current events also whip them into a frenzy, particularly weather-related ones.

I poke gentle fun only, because truth be told, I’ve learned a great deal from these people. Many are quite smart about where PR and marketing are going. I have participated in many of these conversations myself. But never mind that.

During the early February blizzard in the Washington, DC area, I had to altogether log off social media because I feared the apocalyptic wordplay might drive me mad. I’ve been only a sporadic participant on Twitter since. But now that it’s 100+ degrees in DC, a colleague emailed me earlier this week and asked, “Have you been on Twitter today? It’s like snowmageddon all over again…”

Has Serena Williams hired a new media handler? (Not a handler of new media. A handler of media that’s new.) She’s always fascinated me for the same reason my elderly mother, the ultimate tennis fan, despises her. It’s the same reason Lance Armstrong has always fascinated me. They are icy if not downright bitchy in media interviews (Lance and Serena, not my mom …). As a matter of philosophy, they refuse to pay the competition even an ounce of respect.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve watched Serena Williams dis or dismiss an opponent over the years. No “She played a great match.” No “Her forehand is really dangerous.” No “I admire her tenacity.”  The PR person in me would silently beckon her, “Please say just one nice thing about that poor girl you just wiped up the court with.” But it never came.

And in the rare instances in which she loses? Even worse. Want to be sure Serena Williams never, EVER pays your tennis game even an ounce of respect?  Beat her.

In all the years Lance won the Tour de France, he did the same thing. He used media interviews to marginalize and intimidate his opponents. It’s not lovable. But you gotta admit, the killer instinct is fascinating. (He’s trying it again right now, even though he’s no longer the favorite. We’ll see how it goes.)

But this past Wimbledon, you could’ve knocked me over with a feather. Serena has never been more dominant. But there she was, doling out praise. She praised forehands and backhand, hustle and game.  I know she didn’t dream up this softened, more huggable persona on her own. I smell a rat, though my mom loves it.

More and more I find myself having conversations with traditional Washington, DC public affairs types who have come to recognize, thankfully, that social media should probably be at least a cog in the wheel of their next campaign. But the beliefs about what commitment of effort and resources will check that box often falls way short of what will actually generate impact.

If you’re one of those, you might be inclined to do any of the below three things.  Don’t.  Because they’re not good enough:

1.  Slap a Facebook logo on the campaign website. Surround it with the words, “We’re on Facebook!”  Link it to a stagnant Facebook page that parrots your very corporate campaign messages. Never look at that Facebook page again.  Don’t designate anyone’s time to cultivate and participate in issue-dialogue on it.  Don’t invest resources in thinking up and pursuing desired conversation “tracks” that are appropriate for that community and might really get people interested.

2. Set up a Twitter account with your corporate or campaign logo as your picture. In the bio area, write “This is the corporate account for Acme Corporation.”  Then log on about once a week, blurt out a campaign message, then log off.  Fail to commit someone’s time to carefully searching Twitter to see who is talking about your issue.  Fail to follow those people, then watch them, then engage them so they might ultimately actually listen to what your campaign has to say.

3. Set up a blog then fill it with corporate-sounding press releases. Rename your campaign’s “News Releases” section a “blog” because it sounds newfangled.  Fill it with anonymous repetition of corporate messaging.  Update it randomly if at all.  Avoid investing time in an editorial calendar.  Fail to identify a very human author.  Avoid the inconvenience of thinking through and specifying the blog’s “voice.”  Don’t allow readers to comment on posts.  If they do, ignore them.

Congratulations for understanding that, depending on your issue and effort, there is much wisdom to thinking about what social media strategy could do for you.  But it’s got to be a strategy, just like your earned media or lobbying component.  That means some resources have got to be put behind it.  Then you might find some real results.  Best of luck.

My Facebook presence is intentionally more open than closed. I like it that way. I believe the power of the social web is the sum total of countless individual choices to be transparent.

But over the weekend, someone who I haven’t spoken to in 20+ years wrote something dreadfully inappropriate on my Wall. The bizarre, erratic comment spent seven minutes in view of the world before I caught it, deleted it, and blocked the perpetrator.  In that short time, on a Saturday night, the comment may have gone unnoticed.  That would be a lucky break — it would have been offensive to just about anyone.

I’m trying to figure out what, if anything, I should do to inoculate against such an incident in the future. I don’t really want to lock down my Facebook Wall. I can’t really imagine such a thing happening once, much less twice. But if it did –- and if I didn’t catch it — it could be really unfortunate.

This is a great blog post from Dave Fleet on how to approach social media as part of marketing, communications and public affairs campaigns. There’s a lot of advice out there on this topic, but I find this one particularly good.  For instance, check out these tell-tale signs that a social media campaign has been approached with the wrong mindset:

• A short-term focus, often manifested in a desire for “disposable properties” and a reluctance to sustain any kind of presence after the end of the campaign.
• The desire for campaign-based tactics with no existing presence of any kind.
• A one-way broadcasting focus, aiming to blast messages out to the target audience.

If you’re interested in the topic, it’s definitely worth a read.

In a couple of short months, business has gone from unsettlingly slow to crushing. It’s been upwards of a year since I’ve had so much work to do that I have approached being overwhelmed. Even the timeliness of updates to this blog is suffering from the deluge.

I don’t know that this run will continue through the summer, but it might. As I posted on Facebook earlier this week, let me count my blessings that at this moment, in an economy that is not quite recovered, I am among the lucky ones.