Lee Aase | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Blogs for PR Clip Reporting

My previous post may have seemed a little off-topic, because it was essentially a recap of some coverage of a news release, with links to several of the stories. In reality, it was a concrete example of this PR tip, how you can use blogs for PR clip reporting. This is another way you can use social media tools to accomplish business objectives more effectively than through last-generation tools like email.

In my work with the National Media Relations and New Media team at Mayo Clinic, we regularly distribute news releases about findings of Mayo Clinic’s researchers as they appear in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Examples of these are general medical journals like Journal of the American Medical Association, New England Journal of Medicine or Mayo Clinic Proceedings, basic science-oriented journals like Science, PNAS or Nature or others that are devoted to a particular medical specialty such as Circulation or Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

When we do a news release like this one on ovary removal and its correlation with an increased risk of dementia, we want to report results on the news coverage to the physicians and researchers involved, and to leaders of their department and staff members in our Department of Public Affairs.

Typically, if the story involves one major broadcast network or a newspaper like USA Today or the New York Times, we can just send an email with the link to the story. In this case, because of the extent of coverage, that would have been unwieldy.
When we get extraordinary response, we’re starting to use a blog on our intranet to communicate with our key internal groups. We can have links to some of the key stories, and can compile them all in one place to make it convenient for people who are interested to get a feel for the nature and extent of coverage. It also gives them a single link to a blog post that they can copy and paste into an email message to share with colleagues.

We have some key external groups we want to keep informed about the news, too. Unfortunately, because they don’t have access behind our IT firewall, they can’t get to our internal blog. So, here’s an external version of what we placed on our internal blog, which highlights some of the exceptional news coverage Dr. Walter Rocca’s study in Neurology received.

A blog is not an efficient way to produce a comprehensive PR clip report; other services are better for that. And it only works for summarizing on-line coverage. But to quickly do a “show and tell” report, sifting through and identifying key coverage and adding commentary and context, a blog is hard to beat. For this time I just assembled the highlights in my personal blog; we may want to consider developing an external blog for this purpose. It wouldn’t be hard, or expensive, to do.

Technorati: PR, Clip Reports, Media Relations, Blog, Clips, measurement, PR measurement, Public Relations

Mayo Clinic Study In Neurology

Here are links to some of the most prominent stories done in the last 24 hours on this research study on ovary removal and risk of neurologic conditions, which was led by Dr. Walter Rocca, a neurologist at Mayo Clinic:

TIME magazine

Here is the Associated Press story as it appears in the Washington Post and in USA Today.

Yahoo News has a video of the NBC News Channel story, which ran not only throughout the U.S. but also, as you will see, in Australia.

A story on the Ivanhoe newswire

The HealthDay newswire story as it appears on Forbes.com

The Bloomberg News wire story

The BBC News story

The Reuters Health news story

Here is the ScienceDaily story, which was adapted from the news release.

This is just a sampling; Google News currently shows 167 total articles. But it does reflect some of the breadth of coverage this study received.

Technorati: Dr. Walter Rocca, Mayo Clinic, News, Neurology, Ovary removal, Dementia

Facebook: A Series of Tubes?

TIME magazine’s recent article – “Why Facebook is the Future” – contains this excellent synoposis of what Facebook really is:

Facebook’s appeal is both obvious and rather subtle. It’s a website, but in a sense, it’s another version of the Internet itself: a Net within the Net, one that’s everything the larger Net is not.

And so, with that description of Facebook as “a Net within the Net,” we can’t help but refer to Sen. Ted Stevens’ definition of the internet as a whole to help us better understand what Facebook is:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f99PcP0aFNE]

Sen. Stevens’ speech was repeatedly ridiculed on The Daily Show and elsewhere by those who thought it demonstrated a, well… less-than-complete understanding of the internet and how it works.Yet some of the chatter about Facebook and its suitability for business use doesn’t sound much more enlightened than either Sen. Stevens or Caitlin Upton, Miss South Carolina Teen USA, and her explanation of why U.S. students don’t know much about geography…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3iNxZ8Dww]

Using Facebook for business won’t “plug up the tubes” and get in the way of the personal messages you want to deliver. It’s also not just for college students; the 35+ age demographic is the fastest growing segment among its 35+ million members.

Sure, many of the applications developed for its platform are pointless diversions, but there are some quite useful ones. For example, file sharing applications like Files and MediaFire provide shared virtual hard drives for file exchange. I’ll be reviewing those in a future post. Both provide handy work-arounds to the file size limits most people have in their email, and without the complicated language of ftp servers.
Others have raised the red flags – or red herrings – of inappropriately personal applications causing embarrassment. For example, a SuperPoke user might inadvertenly slap, bite, kick or pinch a business colleague instead of poking.

Egads! The solution to that would be, “Don’t slap, bite, kick or pinch your professional associates.” Or don’t install SuperPoke. Or why would you poke a co-worker when you could send a message instead?

Others suggest that personal photos posted by others, which appear on your Wall or in your mini-feed, could be embarrassing. Those situations can be substantially resolved by adjusting your privacy settings for your limited profile and not showing your Wall or mini-feed to your professional colleagues.

For some people who wouldn’t think of using Facebook for business, the language I just used is foreign; that’s because they haven’t tried Facebook, and so they are making judgments based on rumor and hearsay instead of personal experience.

Facebook is an information-sharing utility. It works well for personal, diversionary pursuits, and it works equally well for sharing information and creating discussions of professional topics.

Just as the same internet “tubes” carry personal and business emails — and even 10 movies at one time — so can the same Facebook infrastructure facilitate maintenance of personal and business relationships without getting things “tangled up.”

And there are even some map applications that could help Miss Upton.

Technorati: Facebook, Ted Stevens, series of tubes, Files, MediaFire, Facebook platform, Caitlin Upton, Miss South Carolina, maps

Facebook: Friction-Free Friendship

In a recent post in his From Where I Sit blog, Thomas Nelson Publishers CEO Michael Hyatt shares his frustrating experience in a couple of bookstores, where “friction” created by long lines and lack of available personnel caused him to abandon his purchases and instead opt for the friction-free environment of Amazon.com. He also relates his good experience at the Apple store, and how it is set up to make it easy to buy, with roving cashiers ready to swipe a credit card so you can be on your way.

Interestingly, the absence of friction is exactly the quality I used to describe Facebook earlier this month when I said it had reached a Tipping Point (and interestingly that judgment was affirmed in the last two weeks by a cover story in Newsweek and another important article in TIME.)

Facebook isn’t intended as a place to make friends, but it does eliminate a good chunk of the effort involved in maintaining the relationships you have with people you already know. If you are Facebook friends, you’ll see their birthdays, and occasionally some of their activities, in your news feed. And they’ll see some updates about you. All this happens without any effort at all. You can send them a message spur-of-the-moment message in a few seconds without having to look up their current address, phone or email, and you don’t need to worry about it getting stuck in an overactive spam filter.

Likewise, Facebook groups can make connecting with your business and professional colleagues easier. If you have key vendors, suppliers, customers or sources, you can send them a friend invitation (perhaps with access to your limited profile.) But another good alternative is to invite them to join a group, without them necessarily becoming your “friend.” You can use the Message All Members function to broadcast a message to all of them, or you can engage in a private conversation with any.

Because they’ve either opted in as your friend or as a member of your group, you can have priority access to each other. If you have the Facebook Mobile application installed, you can be alerted by text message on your cell phone whenever someone sends you a message in Facebook. That can enable you to provide the highest quality service and personal attention to people who are most important to your business or professional success.

Facebook is a slick tool for taking the friction out of maintaining relationships and exchanging information.

Technorati: Facebook, Groups, Friction, Michael Hyatt, Apple, Amazon, friends