Yesterday morning, I moved myself and my laptop onto the back patio for awhile, hoping the change of scenery would spark some creative inspiration. I was so overcome with the beauty of my setting that I snapped a webcam photo and posted it on Facebook, along with a fairly celebratory comment about my general good fortune. No sooner than I hit submit, incoming poop from a bypassing sparrow landed squarely on my freshly shaved head.
The second iteration of this Kinkennon Communications website I love launched today. We’re getting serious about using this as a place to reveal our thinking on just how much communications, marketing and issue advocacy are changing – and the degree to which KC intends to stay on the edge of it.
We’ve re-launched and re-purposed this blog to provide analysis and reflections on the astonishing evolutions at the intersection of communications and media (along with other meanderings on favorite topics of mine, like work-life balance).
We’re participating at a considerable level on Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets … and we’re using those social media outlets to draw attention when appropriate to our thoughts and reflections here.
It would be naïve to think that KC’s successes to date at calling reporters and generating news stories for our clients is going to matter five years from now. By that time, marketing and other institutional communications will be near impossible to control, centralize, “manage” or even “message.” It’ll be about keeping customers and employees and members and other engrained stakeholders happy … REALLY happy … so the information they publish on their own is helpful to organizational goals … or at least not destructive.
Attempts at spin doctoring will be seen as dated and trite. Transparency will be king. Authenticity and integrity will go from nice-to-have to root requirement. It’ll be a whole new world. KC is helping clients maneuver all of that now, and the fun has only just begun. Let’s go.
I’m starting to “get” what I’m getting from Twitter. By nature of the people who I’ve stumbled across and selected to follow, the tidbits arriving on my desktop around the clock via Twitter are giving me this curious new means to be informed and get smart without investing any real effort. I’m accessing brainpower and insights that I’ve never had a line into before, and it’s startlingly free and easy.
Some of the stuff I pick up is valuable for professional growth. (Wall Street Journal’s social media policy? Check. Thanks @mashable.) Others stuff I pick up is just plain quirky-fascinating. (What Lance Armstrong and his teammates are eating before today’s Giro stage? Check. See for yourself @lancearmstrong.)
The experience strikes me as a purposeful semi-structured dialogue, not unlike the last good conference I attended. You learn new things. You meet new people that know new things. The cumulative effect, you suppose, is new doors opened. But rather than costing a bunch of money and taking you away from your life for three days, this good conference goes on and on, and you can participate in cargo shorts.
To be a bona fide connector who happens to lack proclivity for small talk is an odd balancing act for a guy who runs his own communications shop. It’s making Twitter seem like the right kind of place.
Let’s say, for the sake of discussion, that you’re the one PR person at a small nonprofit –an advocacy organization on a state-level issue, for instance. Your CEO says, “Go figure out this Twitter thing.”
Here’s a cheat sheet – five little things you can implement quickly, without investing much time, and without an ounce of expertise. You’ll show Miss CEO that you know your stuff (even if, well, you really don’t).
1. Sign up for Twitter. Duh! Make your username (the moniker other Twitter users will see) a combo of your name and your organization’s name. Maybe BobwithACME. That way, when the time is right for you yourself to start tweeting, if you decide to, it’ll be clear that (a) you’re speaking on behalf of ACME, but that (b) you’re a real, warm-blooded human being. But more on that in a minute…
2. Search on your issue. First, if (by chance) your issue is red hot, take a look at the “Trending Topics” in the right sidebar – the most popular topics on Twitter at any given moment. Not there? Do a search and take a look at the results. If someone has tweeted several times on your issue, click on their profile and look at their other updates. Are they tweeting on your issue regularly? Is their commentary substantive? Do they have lots of followers? Does their mini-profile tell you anything about them? Is your issue there? Make a decision if they’re worth paying attention to, then…
3. Opt to “follow” those tweeting on your issue. When on their profile page, click the “Follow” button … simple as that. Now anything they tweet, on your issue and otherwise, will be fed onto your Twitter homepage, in a tidy package ready for you to view. You’ll officially be “listening” to the marketplace of ideas.
4. Keep Twitter open and pay attention. Run Twitter while at your desk, and keep your eyes peeled. (Use a free app like Tweetdeck or the many others that can make that easier.) Do the people you’re following tweet on your issue regularly? What are they saying? Are they clear on the facts? Are there any trends in misinformation? Gather a sense of the tenor and tone of the conversation, to decide if you should…
5. Weigh in. Chances are, some of the folks you opted to follow will choose to follow you in turn … particularly if your organization (“ACME” in our little scenario) is one they associate with your issue. They’ll be curious what you have to say. So say it! Offer up brief examples of ACME’s learning, thinking, or activities on the issue. Correct misconceptions. Offer new perspectives. Be genuine. Be courteous. Don’t say anything obnoxious. Even prefix a “hash tag” (the “#” sign, no space) to your issue name (e.g. #Complete Streets). Then not only your followers will see your post on the topic, but also anyone who searches on it.
Your organization will soon be part of the dialogue.
I’m one of two new members of the board of directors of the fantastic Gay & Lesbian Leadership Institute. When joining the board, new members make a commitment to raise a significant amount of money. Privately, I guessed my fellow newbie and I would enjoy a bit of a “honeymoon” period before being expected to haul in real dollars. My co-newbie is a nice, quiet lady. Candidly, I didn’t expect her to drum up a $100,000 commitment in only our second month on the job. I guess I’d better get busy.
“Transparency succeeds when it is embedded into the culture of a company, not implemented as a program designed to be exercised by only a few.” So says Shel Holtz and John Havens in their book Tactical Transparency: how leaders can leverage social media to maximize value and build their brand. It’s a great read about brand management in the web 2.0 world.
But that concept isn’t just for brand managers at Fortune 500 consumer-product companies, which is who Holtz and Havens largely write for in this particular instance. It’s for communications and PR folks at B2B companies and nonprofits and membership organizations and government entities. For those of us who work for or interact with organizations like that, it is largely up to us to convince our executives and board members that “message control” and “opacity” as we have known them are obsolete. Doing PR like it’s been done for decades won’t work any more.
Technology has created a reality that forces us to interact with our stakeholders in entirely different ways – to free the reins on our people to establish new, nontraditional, far more authentic conversations between the organization and its stakeholders.
I don’t particularly love New York, but I love many things about it. One of those things is New York business wear. Admittedly I’ve never lived in New York. I’ve probably only been there 10 or 15 times in my life. So I shouldn’t claim expertise on this topic. But to me, businesspeople in New York look really sharp. So I wear lots of grey and black in work situations, hoping I look a little New York.
Check out this story by freelance writer Michael Estrin.
He lifts up three brands that “get” Twitter. I’m particularly intrigued by his description of the way Texas Instruments is using it. The company opened the door for customers with product questions to communicate directly with the Texas Instruments engineers that designed the product, via Twitter. It’s sort of call-center style dialogue, but directly from the horse’s mouth, and for all to see. What’s more, the engineering team ends up with insights they never would have gathered otherwise.
Estrin asserts the common denominator is “helpfulness” – licensing individuals internally to use Web 2.0 applications (like Twitter) to be helpful to the broader customer community … or by proxy, the marketplace. That very well put premise can apply in about any and every organization conceivable today.
I grew up in an East Coast public-relations-agency world that sort of required showing face at cocktail parties, receptions and all varieties of after-hours work events. It is an unspoken yet often very central requirement of those jobs. To be respected at a PR agency, particularly in DC, you really need to be a breadwinner whose bread is won by backslapping.
I was decent enough at drumming up new clients, but I was never comfortable doing it that way. I hate name-dropping events and self-important small talk – I just don’t do that. Thus, even though I was able to recruit new clients, I felt like the results were never taken particularly seriously because my method was never taken particularly seriously.
I’m a consummate connector. I make relationships with all kinds of people – sometimes auto mechanics, sometimes Senior VPs. I listen, and I offer to help when it’s appropriate. It worked then, and it really works for KC now.
I’m involved in a new campaign by the United Methodist Church that calls on people to think of church as a verb rather than a noun. In advertisements and in all sorts of social media outlets, it’ll pose rhetorical questions like, “What if church came with sunscreen and bug spray?” It’s clever marketing and strategic positioning and reflective of the latest research on what is important to young “spiritual seekers.”
But the reason I love it because it’s a great example of a big, old, shrinking institution looking to its mission as it tries to find its way in an entirely changed world. Sounds obvious enough, right? But I could tick off 20 huge organizations, household name-sized, that neither you nor I could name the base reason why they exist.
The origins of the United Methodist Church were Christians going to poor people and working to better their condition as a means of spreading the gospel. The Methodist forebears were outbound and active … sort of “verb-like.” Increasingly, the church seems to believe (realize?) that it needs to get back to that. Good stuff! People can only benefit.
I also love it because it reveals an inviting and relevant facet of organized Christianity, rather than the default facet that so many of my peers (OK, and I…) perceive as closed and, frankly, angry.
The thing is going to be funded at up to $20 million over the next four years, so it’s not a small deal.
