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?

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.

Still working on updating pages here on the site that the WordPress pharma hack infected. I apologize if you see in a title or search something that obviously I am not selling… I think between Carlos Moreno, Doug Stewart and some very helpful Twitter friends (@bradleyhunt, @rmalove), the worst is over.
If you were, indeed, searching for some concoction (I don’t want to use any of the keywords that would just pull more unrelated traffic!), I apologize. This blog is written by me, Mandy Vavrinak, about integrated marketing, public relations, marketing places, and digital relevance.
As soon as I’m confident all the pages (there are a lot of infected posts) are updated, I’ll get back to writing new content for the blog. Thanks, everyone, for your support One thing I’ve learned from this, other than those security measures they recommend taking with your database are worth it, is that we all get along with a little help from our friends, online or off.

Speaker Group from 2011 #SMTulsa conference. Image by Captured Charms Photography

When I entered the Hyatt Downtown hotel to find the registration area for the Social Media Tulsa 2011 Conference, I was running a wee bit behind, had parked (and trekked) two blocks carrying my very heavy laptop, iPad, charging cords and cable connector laden bag, and was mentally rehearsing the presentation I would shortly be giving on New PR: Beyond the Press Release. In short, I was not really focused on the people or environment around me. Don’t we all get that way? A little wrapped up in our own to-do lists, pressing work, writing, whatever?

Then I rounded a corner about five people said, almost simultaneously, “Hey! It’s Mandy!” I had kind of “Norm!” moment. (If you don’t get it… here’s a YouTube vid to help you, first minute will do it.) And yes, five people mildly excited to see me does equal a “moment” for me. Don’t judge.

The point is I snapped back to the present… engaged, listened, conversed, became social. I left the mental gymnastics and the day’s earlier frustrations behind and settled into the moment. I met lots new people, learned some new information, witnessed other professionals sharing what they knew with the audience. And I presented my session on Public Relations and how to use social tools to get better results. It was a blast… not just because speaking, teaching and interacting like that energizes me, but because the audience rocked. They had great questions, and didn’t wait until very end to ask them. That meant we had the opportunity to branch out and explore a few topics like negative comments, corporate versus personal voices and other aspects of the world of socially enabled public relations. People in the audience were connecting with each other, too, which means more knowledge-sharing and learning per capita than what would have happened if it were just me talking up there.

I left at the end of the day reminded of why I love what I do… I love finding the (sometimes hidden) stories in a company or personal story and helping to tell them through public relations, marketing or even traditional advertising. But, if you don’t get out there and meet people, listen to what they wonder, what they question, what they believe, what they want… you miss out on lots of great stories. Even if they aren’t the kind that need to be told to a wider audience.

I like to speak because I like to connect, listen, learn and share. I like to speak at events like Social Media Tulsa and last month’s Spark and Hustle because the audience they attract is top notch, and that elevates the conversation and connections to a place where the time spent preparing, delivering, and attending the whole conference is totally worth it.

Thanks, SMTulsa people, for making the day such a vivid reminder of why I love what I do and for sharing your day with me and the other speakers… and most especially thanks to Cheryl Lawson for putting the whole thing together. Can’t wait till next year!

Photo Credit: Captured Charms Photography.

Last summer, I moderated the PR panel at the Get Social Conference in OKC (Oklahoma City for the uninitiated). The conversation turned quickly to How do I Get Media Coverage? Panelists were Dave Rhea from the statewide Journal Record newspaper, Andrew Speno from Fox25 News in OKC and Mike Koehler, blogger, PR pro and former reporter. Here are some of their PR pearls of wisdom:

1.) Don’t suck. Pretty simple, but powerful when you think about it. Don’t be a user… don’t lie… don’t spam… don’t be disrespectful. Don’t pitch news that isn’t news. If you’re in PR, you know what I’m talking about, whether or not you are following the advice. If you’re not in PR, what I mean is be human first. You need to reach out and interest another human in your story if you want it covered, and that means it needs to be interesting to other humans. And that you need to respect the time and attention of the media people you’re trying to reach.

2.) Write well. Headlines matter… and if you’re e-mailing, that means the subject line of your e-mail should be something OTHER than “News Advisory!” or “MEDIA ALERT!!!!” Special note: multiple exclamation points don’t make your news more newsworthy, they just make you seem desperate.

3.) Think about timing. Andew suggested having your press conference or announcement on Sunday afternoon. Stations spend all day Sunday scrambling to fill the same broadcast time they have to fill on Friday night. Mike mentioned a situation where a local group sponsoring a tournament wanted coverage… the same day as a major OU/OSU game, a draft and a coaching scandal. Obviously, some things are beyond control and cannot be planned for, but not planning your little league coaches awards ceremony on the same day as college football season kicks off will help your chances.

4.) Think about angles. Is something happening RIGHT NOW that you can add to, build on, be an expert for? For instance, as snow blankets Oklahoma, again, and people go into bunker mode, again, are you a mental health professional who can speak to the real aspects of “cabin fever” and how to help? Recognize that “Mental Health Service Adds Dr. X to Lineup” isn’t really interesting beyond anyone in Dr. X’s family. Dr. X talking about cabin fever, however, is timely, relevant, and his (new) affiliation with your practice will certainly be in the story.

5.) Don’t always be selling. Be the person who’s always available, always good for a quote, or for an honest attempt to help source a story. Coming through for reporters means you get on their “people who don’t annoy me” list and you are much more likely to get their attention when you need it.

Dave Rhea summed it up this way: Be Real and Don’t Be Boring. Pretty succinct, I think.

In my opinion, here’s what small business owners should do, first, to start this process: Use the search functions in social media and find and follow every individual in their respective niche or local markets. Listen to and read what they tweet or share. Get to know them (that whole Be Real and Don’t Suck part mentioned above) and what makes them tick. Every reporter or blogger has trigger subjects… things they’re passionate about. Find out what they are. Re-share relevant information. I did a radio interview on this subject, and using social media to help achieve better PR, available here, if you wanna give it a listen for more info.

Using social media to achieve better PR results isn’t fundamentally different… it’s a connection engine that helps you find and then build relationships with media contacts. In the end, good public relations is still about relationships. Social media can help you build them more quickly and nurture them more easily.

There’s only 5 things on this list… anything you think is missing from our Don’t Be Ignored list?

(A version of this post was originally posted over at The Journal Record’s blog hub but this a topic I’ve been seeing a lot lately, so wanted to re-share with the audience over here… plus, some updates/edits have been made to this version. — Mandy)

This is the framing post for the Wednesday, 2/9/11 #smchat on Twitter.

When you live in a social media fueled world, you sometimes forget to examine the larger perspectives out there. The more engaged in social media you are, the more likely this is to happen to you, your company, your clients or your brand. Social Media blinders are dangerous and marketers, PR people, brand managers and small business owners need to know the signs and how to look beyond.

Signs you may be wearing blinders:

1. You can’t remember the last time you watched an entire local newscast or read more than two stories from one issue of your local newspaper (even online)
2. You have no idea which local TV or newspaper reporters cover your business area or expertise
3. You get all or nearly all of your news from either your Twitter feed or your Facebook feed

What can happen?

1. Missed PR opportunities, missing trends or local shifts in perception that may not be filtering through to social media
2. Skewed view of your marketplace or your target audience’s wants, needs, problems or challenges
3. Giving up market share to competitors who are not constrained by blinders

How can you combat Social Media Blinders?

1. Use Google Alerts for more than just your name or your company name. Stay on top of key concepts or phrases in your industry or marketplace.
2. Stay in touch with what is happening in your local community by staying engaged with your local media.
3. Create content that is easily shareable beyond Twitter or Facebook. Think larger, think longer-term.
4. Get to know how much time your target market spends online, and where they spend it. Most importantly, figure out WHY they’re online. Posting coupons to Facebook is great if customers are there for coupons. If they are there for backstory and to find out about your corporate responsibility, you’ll need a different strategy.
5. Get out there… literally.

Got more? Other concerns about living to much in a hyper-connected world as it pertains to marketing, PR, brand, business or reputation? Anything you want to be sure we address in the chat? Post away in the comments!

Hope you’ll be able to join us this Wednesday, 1PM Eastern/noon Central for the chat. If you miss it, check out wthashtag.com for the transcript afterward. I’ll post the link in the comments on this post after we wrap the chat.

Look, Mom... Sharks!

You see, when you sleep with the fishes at the aquarium, you sleep right beside the tanks and exhibits. On the concrete floor. My comforter-doubled-over-for-padding did not cut it in the comfort department. But I digress. Several things happened during our adventure that I thought were great lessons in PR, specifically in event planning. So here, without further ado (and because I’m still working the kinks out of my shoulder and back), are event planning lessons learned:

Prior Planning Makes For Perfect Events > You could tell, rather immediately, which troops and girls had prepared appropriately for the evening and which ones had not. Planning well is the difference between event panic and event accolades. Our troop leader rocks, by the way, and we were armed with flashlights, toothbrushes, vending machine change, and other necessities for the night. And in her defense, she’d recommended foam padding for underneath the sleeping bags. I (ouch) should have listened.

Do, Indeed, Sweat the Small Stuff > Someone, somewhere, decided “Alice in Wonderland” (the new, Tim Burton version) would be a great movie to screen in the big hall before lights out. Some of the girls in attendance were 5 or 6. All the girls had gone on a red-filtered flashlight tour of the aquarium exhibits to observe the animals in their nighttime modes just before the movie. So you watch a giant moray eel by flashlight and then see giant scary things on the movie screen and then you go sleep someplace unfamiliar in the dark? uhhh… not a win for the younger girls. Me, my daughter and her three other young troop members all bailed on the movie about 30 min in and went to settle down on the concrete instead. Be sure to think through all the choices… go visit the site for your event, for instance, at the time of day you’re having it. Are there traffic issues? Parking problems? What are the best sight lines for TV cameras? Do you have a need for or access to electricity? A microphone? Podium? Are there outlets so reporters can plug in anything they might need to? Refreshments? And if you’re serving food with napkins or containers, do you have a trash can handy?

Some Of Us Are Best Out Of The Spotlight > The flashlight tour was an amazing thing… so many of the animals that were, well, boring during the regular hours of operation were quite interesting at night. The story my daughter has told over and over? How she got to see the inside of a clam (really a mussel) and how when someone’s non-red-filtered light shone into the tank by mistake the “clam” snapped shut again. The “clams” are definitely at their best out of the spotlight. So are eels and some of the jellyfish. If you’re planning an event for a client, know the strengths of the people you’re working with and for. If the COO is not comfortable in large groups of people, gently talk the CEO out of making him speak at the event. Yes, it’s wonderful that Bill wants to share the spotlight with Ted, but in order for it to remain a big adventure and not become a big disaster, Ted needs to play a role he’s better suited for… perhaps welcoming guests one on one at the entrance, or simply hovering in the background, available for a one-on-one later on.

So there you have it… Plan, Prepare, Pick Your Performers. And take the foam padding next time you go sleep with the fishes. Trust me.

Event hiccups, disasters, funny moments you want to share? Please go ahead! It makes us all feel better to know we’re not alone in the moments we remember that we’d really rather forget.

– (Originally posted on the Journal Record’s Blog Hub, August 7, 2010)