I’d done some reading, some evaluating, some equivocating… but I finally took the plunge and joined in the fun on Pinterest. Here are some things I’ve discovered:

It’s quiet and undemanding. It’s not about real-time conversation. It’s not really about conversation at all, actually. It IS about connections. It’s about inspiration, curation and obsession. Here are the things you’ll need to know to join in. (Note… it’s invite only. You can let me know you want an invite in the comments for quicker access, or you can enter your email address on the Pinterest.com homepage and one will show up in your inbox in a few days.)

Pinterest is a virtual “pin-board” not unlike the old-fashioned cork board you probably had in your bedroom as a teenager or may still have on your office wall (note image of mine). The difference is now you can have as many boards as you have diverse interests. On my account I have one for places I like to go, one for information I think is worth sharing, one for stuff that makes me smile, etc. Virtual wedding planning, home decor ideas, DIY home improvement, jewelry, crafts, fashion look books… all common boards.

But, the uses that intrigue me and make me think the now 4 million plus users of Pinterest are on to something are ones like these, posted by some of my Facebook friends when I asked them about the service:

• It’s like being a contemporary art director of dreams. – Jennifer Luitwieler
• “Mood Boards” for client projects. – Trisha Salas
• Resource images for photography clients. I can add them to the collaborators on the album and both of us can add images, talk about what we like, don’t like etc. – Marty Coleman (a.k.a. The Napkin Dad)

Successful brands using Pinterest aren’t doing tons of pinning their own stuff. They’re doing lots of putting out eye-catching visuals on their websites and making it easy for users to pin them to their own boards. Each “pin” is embedded with the source link from the website, so it’s a referral engine for pins that go viral and get “re-pinned” to other user’s boards. Commenting is possible, and some people do, but the beauty of the service is, well, it’s beauty. It’s visual, visceral and always changing. You don’t have to comment or feel compelled to “keep up” with the flow. Viewing a board lets you quickly scan a wealth of content in one glance, and users can follow only select boards of others if they want to. For instance, I am not a home decor makeover freak or particularly crafty. I tend to not follow those kinds of boards though I may follow the same user’s “Books I Want to Read” board.

Ready to give it a whirl? I’ve pinned some good Pinterest articles to my Info To Share board, and I’d suggest following Collen Pence’s Pinterest info board, too.

After reading some of the tech coverage of the Consumer Electronics Show happening in Las Vegas this week, one thing stood out… following is more than a trend in social media. It’s the norm for big tech companies. The reviews of Windows 8, coming sometime soon to a PC near you, has a screen of tiles that you scroll through, “similar to what you find on a smartphone or tablet.” And what launched the initial touchscreen/swiping through icons for navigation trend? An Apple product, the iPhone.

The Tulsa World’s own Robert Evatt interviewed Tara Dunion, senior director of communications of the Consumer Electronics Association, the organizing body of CES, and she told him one of the big trends for product announcements and launches at CES this year is new ultrabooks. Evatt’s article mentioned that tech experts have characterized ultrabooks as similar to the MacBook Air — a product that is as powerful as a traditional laptop yet ultra thin and light.

Full disclosure: I own an iPhone, two iMacs and a MacBookPro. I am definitely an Apple fan. But this post isn’t about praising Apple. Not really. I just wonder where the other innovators are? It’s not enough to have the best iteration of the thing people already know they want… because you’re always going to be spending time and resources on incremental improvements to a known entity and directly competing with every other company out there trying to do the same thing.

Whatever field you’re in… don’t be just a follower. Don’t be the ones out there touting the latest “improvement” to someone else’s product or idea. Spend your time and R&D resources to develop what people need, even if they don’t know they want it yet. Find the problems. Find the pinch points. Figure out a fundamentally better way. Once the product or idea or service begins to take shape, marketing and PR are the tools to help your potential audience see what’s possible, not just what’s passable.

I’ve seen this question several times in LinkedIn and other forums: “What would you do if Penn State were your client?” It’s similar to the ones that swirled for months during the BP oil spill in the gulf and the tense posturing that followed. And the answer is the same for both questions, and any other like them: “I don’t know, exactly, because I’m not on the inside, hearing the secrets, reading the face of the guy who has to go on camera, seeing the possibilities and the problems first hand. And I don’t know, more importantly, because I haven’t spent hours and hours researching, interviewing, formulating and preparing.”

So my advice is to stop wasting your time thinking about the crisis you aren’t called to handle, the one you’ll never need to walk through, and start thinking about the ones that might become your waking nightmare tomorrow. Or later today, for that matter. There are some things every single business owner should do, right now, to help prepare for the inevitable, and believe it or not, one of them is NOT putting a PR pro on retainer.

1. Develop a set of “Who We Are” statements. This need not be a formal process or an official mission statement. The value of official mission statements varies inversely with the size of the company printing them on internal posters. But knowing what you stand for, really, and knowing your employees know it, feel it, live it, is crucial to avoiding many crisis in the first place. If your statements are just hollow words… either take a harder look at who you are, even if it’s painful or you don’t like what you see (you can change it going forward), or fire some people who aren’t rowing in the same direction.
2. Think deeply about your business environment. Categorize risks… do your employees travel by car to locations? To client’s offices or homes? Is your company in the business of advising people on a course of action that might affect their health, wealth, enjoyment or happiness? Are there regulations that change or may change that affect how you do business? Is employee turnover high? Do you have proprietary information that could be vulnerable? Make some notes about some of the possibilities, including ones that don’t seem all that likely, such as a high-profile client claiming your employee’s errant word of advice during a chance meeting at a local restaurant caused him to lose (face, millions, a bet…whatever). If there are vulnerabilities that can be fixed or addressed, do that. Have a meeting with your employees and explain the “always representing” aspect of today’s connected marketplace. Have a social media policy in place. Make sure insurance, handbooks, regulations and information are all up to date and appropriately structured or protected. Do some research into other companies similar to yours, in the same fields, and what crisis they’ve weathered… how well, in what ways, with what tools?
3. Get to know some key people in your local media, trade publications, or other venues, including bloggers, social media influencers, city councilors, etc. This is not an overnight thing and following someone on Twitter or connecting on Facebook is not “getting to know them.” You need to have someone who will take your call if a storm does hit and provide you a friendly, or at least neutral, opportunity to share your side of a story. Remember… sometimes it’s not an accusation or a lawsuit. Sometimes it’s a video posted to YouTube about your business practices or showing all the bit of grass your lawn company missed the last time they serviced an irate customer’s yard.

Take a deep breath… when that YouTube video about the missed grass hits, and someone forwards it to you in an email, what then? How do you know when, or if, you should take action? How long, how much, how far? Those are the next things we’ll cover on the blog. In the meantime… what other prep work would you recommend?

UPDATE: This conference is still coming to OK, but will be making its debut in the Spring of 2012 with a more intensive format and open to both men and women. Watch this updates as we firm details! — Mandy

The name is actually misleading, I think… because the conference isn’t really about getting all fired up because Yay! We’re Women! In Business!

It’s about teaching and sharing tools, ideas, methods and collective wisdom about being better in business as a woman. Whether that’s in your own business or as a team member in someone else’s company, the WES is about going further and accomplishing more through leadership, brand and marketing management, and business/entrepreneurship core concepts. The conference is a learning module format with an accompanying workbook. Less rah-rah, more brass tacks. The kind of thing that will help close the entrepreneurship gender gap.

Want to know more? The conference website is here. Register to attend here (and email me if you want a special discount code just for my network).

Hear Deborah, me, Angela Allmond, Joan Vasquez and Aprille Franks talk about some of these issues.

And I hope to see you October 29th in Oklahoma City!

Tomorrow afternoon I’ll be leading a two-part workshop at the 2011 Optimization Summit on How to ROCK Press Coverage for Your Business or Brand. It’s a bigger, badder and more hands-on version of an presentation I put together six months ago for the Social Media Tulsa conference and I’m thrilled I’ll get to share some good stuff about what I do & know and how to make it all work for other peoples’ businesses. One question I get asked all the time is some form of, “When you spend time telling others what you know and how to do what you do, aren’t you afraid they’ll, well, do it? Without you? Aren’t you essentially teaching people how to NOT need you?”

Leaving out the whole, “I’ve been doing this thing I do for a long, long time and all that experience can’t be shared in a two hour workshop” angle (And it’s inherently insulting, by the way, to assume I CAN share everything I know in a workshop), let’s take a look at the underlying motivation of the question. The key is “aren’t you afraid…?” and the answer is yes. Of spiders, of heights, of not being able to find good coffee when I need it, of milk in the carton (it’s a long story)…. Yes. Of teaching business owners or brand managers about New PR and how they can use it to their best advantage? Nope.

New PR is much like Old PR in that it’s driven by the story. We as humans are hardwired to retain stories, to seek meaning and context for information. A good story is the heart of any PR effort. Always has been, always will be. What I teach people is first to find their story. Not their mission/vision/goals/new product release blurb. Their story. Or, stories… It’s not the easiest thing in the world to think about your business or brand from new perspectives and to figure out where your human touchpoints are as a business. So learning how to spot a good story, idea, trend or opportunity is the first thing we’ll be talking about in the workshop tomorrow. We’ll also be talking about the tools of New PR, the reasons why they matter, the long term effects of doing a good job with New PR and how to put it all together into a package that is shareable, sendable, marketable and effective. I’ve yet to meet anyone who didn’t have a story somewhere just waiting, begging sometimes, to be told. It’s in learning to see the potential and how to align it with business goals and marketing campaigns (which hopefully were conceived in partnership with the PR peeps, but I digress…) that “doing PR” becomes something much more powerful. I can’t teach everything I know in a workshop, but if I can help people learn to look at their day to day work, business environment or content in a New PR kind of way and take some steps toward implementing a strategy that works to build their brand, it will be a good day.

I’m not afraid because sharing what I know, about something I love, expands the universe of potential clients for me and potential stories for us all. And that, I think, is something to embrace, not fear. If you’re at this year’s #Optsum, I hope to connect and share some stories while we’re here.

(and my apologies… if you ever tweeted or shared a post from the site, the numbers were all lost when I changed servers. I appreciate each and every share… just don’t have who recommended, liked, tweeted, etc., anymore)

Jessica Johnson of Tulsa Custom Concierge talks with Ron Terrell and Michelle Linn of Fox23 Daybreak during her segment.

NOTE: This post is by Crossroads Communications intern Brenna Wiebe. She’s been involved in several of our client projects from brainstorming to execution this summer and I asked her to share some aspect of that. This is her post. — Mandy

This week I had my first opportunity to see my work pay off on television. This interview segment was like my little baby… I watched it grow before my eyes as I saw it from pitch to production. By the time it was over, I felt like a mother sending her child off to college. Along with this sense of accomplishment came an unexpected bundle of nerves.

I have been using Google + for a few days now (and no, this is not a post all about Google +) and have noticed an interesting phenomenon already. Everyone wants a “do-over” on social connectivity. Much discussion is happening around posts like, “Will you build your network differently here?” And the consensus seems to be that many people want to approach the whole concept of networking differently. Either they intend to be more selective in who they follow or add or they intend to be more rigorous in the groups (“circles” in + parlance) they form or maintain.

Another common thread is the desire to return to the halcyon early days of social networks when the novelty of connecting with other people – interesting people –was the driver behind the growth of Twitter or Facebook. You know, back before brands and marketing became the main focus of those old networks. Yes, that was a tiny bit sarcastic, I admit. Google + could potentially be much larger than Twitter given its much larger reach and the opportunity for even the most casual, non-networked internet user to be exposed to it every time someone does a search. Google + will be baked in to the search experience in a very seamless way by early indications (new “share” buttons have appeared in my gmail and my Google Reader apps already).

I remember the euphoria that accompanied my early days on Twitter, now nearly three years back, when someone new followed me. I long ago turned off “new follow” notifications because the emails were swamping my inbox. But I have the “notifications” from Google + turned on and that old feeling is back…. a little rush when someone adds me or comments on a post or shares something with me. Will it last? Probably not. Google + may end up being a better tool for personal connection, but professional networkers will soon be all over that platform and newly minted Google + jedi, knights, gurus and the like will be hawking their professional help. Soon, the who is following whom will become a game of sorts… social climbing for the 21st century.

Will anything be different in two years? Won’t Google + (or whatever is next) become what the users make of it and choose to do with it? Is a “do-over” really possible if defining relevance online via social cues – really the reason Google is doing this – will continue to be driven by who you know/are connected to and who’s talking about you, your brand, your company, your last presentation, slideshare, blog post or content bit? What do you think?

At Crossroads Communications, LLC (the “official” name of my business, although you probably found me by searching my name; it’s just the way the Google search bounces) we essentially are a message company. We discover the stories of our clients and share them, whether through PR, marketing, advertising, social media, content-creation on blogs, videos, etc. The tools are less important than the focus on the messages. Before we can find and authentically help brands, businesses, and places tell their story, we have to really, and I mean really, get to know them. You can’t effectively market what you don’t understand.

I use a set of questions to help get that process started. They’ve evolved over the past several years, but not as much as some might think… because they are focused on the business goals and objectives rather than the tactics. I hear often that just going through the process of defining the business and its profit centers, challenges, goals and marketplace in the way that we do is valuable to business owners. I also hear that answering the questions we ask is hard work. Until we have a solid idea of where your business IS, why that’s true, and WHERE you want to go… how will we all agree we’ve reached “there?”

While I won’t share the whole set of questions here (I do have to feed my family, after all), I am going to share a few of them with you, and then share some additional thoughts in upcoming blog posts. I hope they’ll be valuable conversation starters for you and your business supporters, partners, or even that little voice in your head who pushes back whenever you want to go try something new.

Defining the Business

Current Challenges

1. What is the biggest obstacle, in your opinion, to purchasing one of your top profit-generating services for most of your potential customers? When you hear “No…” what is the “why?”
2. How much time must you typically invest face to face and behind the scenes to close a sale? Please list face to face separately from behind the scenes. How much of this time is spent explaining what you do, the benefits of using you or of having the service, and generally in educating your prospects?

Looking forward

1. Thinking about the future, what would you like to be different about your business in one year? In three years? What kinds of clients do you want to be serving? What services do you want to sell them?
2. Considering your profit-generating activities of today, what do you see changing, growing, fading over the next 1 to 3 years in those activities? Do you see an increasing demand for what currently drives your profit or a declining demand? Why?
3. If the demand for today’s profit-driving activities may decline or remain flat, what other activities or products are within or adjacent to your current expertise and offerings which might be increasing in demand over the next 3 years?

Did anything above make you stop and think for a minute about your business? How do you keep your business “on-track”?

This is a guest post by Brenna Wiebe, OSU Strategic Communications Senior and summer intern at Crossroads Communications. Brenna is working on a major in Public Relations and a minor in Marketing and will be writing on the blog from time to time this summer. I’m excited to have her as part of our team for the next few months and hope many of you will have the chance to meet Brenna or connect with her on Twitter or here on the blog. — Mandy

Gymnastics of the mental kind wear you out, too.

Despite the late nights of last minute studying and the early mornings of my classes, I always managed to find time to catch up on rest in school. Well, then the real world hit me last week as I began my internship at Crossroads Communications. Never have I been more exhausted in my life. Finals week tired doesn’t even compare to your first few days in the real world tired. I don’t remember the last time I was passed out in bed by 9 o’clock multiple nights in a week; yet, last week it happened at least three times. It wasn’t until I had a chat with my boss, Mandy, on the way home from a meeting in Catoosa about why work was so tiring that I understood. As soon as I heard her explain the toll our jobs take on us, it was like the heavens parted and I heard the choirs of angels. As a public relations intern, I have the opportunity to work with clients in varying industries. This means that on any given day, I can go from a meeting with people who own a recycling plant to an owner of a pizzeria.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Blake Ewings’ closing keynote at last weeks’ Social Media Tulsa conference. One of the key takeaways for me was this statement:

It doesn’t mean only “tweet positive” but it does mean when sending thoughts, links, info etc. out into the world, we should all be mindful of the larger effect. It’s easy to say, “If you wouldn’t want your Mom to know, don’t post it,” but really, most of us feel a little more insulated in our online worlds than that. We use the public conversation to share our private frustrations. Sometimes, before we’ve taken the time to try to solve them privately. I have been guilty of this…

I’m still processing how and what I want to change about how I participate in the public conversation. What kind of social responsibility comes with a larger-than-average audience online? Mine isn’t anything like the superstars of the Interwebs, but it’s exponentially larger than the “average Jane” on Twitter, Facebook, etc. What obligations does that, or should that, entail as far as sharing?

And… based on some feedback I’ve already gotten on this post… does being more human actually give you more of a voice? Do people just care more if they “know you?” My instincts and experience tell me yes.

Like I said, still processing… and interested to hear your thoughts!