HARO: Craigslist for PR and Journalism

I had heard about Peter Shankman’s service, HARO – Help A Reporter Out, but until yesterday hadn’t gotten around to trying it. I had meant to check it out, but it just never got to the top of my to-do list. Probably it’s because my focus has been in social media instead of mainstream, traditional media.

Apparently 37,000 other PR sources haven’t been so slow in adopting.

My first impression has been quite positive. HARO is a really neat service, with a site for sources to sign up to receive thrice-daily emails of media requests, and a separate page for journalists to enter their source requests. Peter goes through the journalist requests and categorizes them (actually, the journalists do the categorization themselves) and sends the email digests to the HARO, community which operates on five simple rules. And it’s free to both sources and journalists.

You also can get Urgent HARO requests by following Peter on Twitter.

Craigslist has contributed significantly to the mainstream media meltdown, particularly in newspapers, by offering a free alternative to what formerly had been a cash-cow monopoly, the local classified ad.

I don’t know whether Peter aims to do the same to ProfNet, an established service of PR Newswire that is free to journalists but not to PR sources.

What do you think? Have you used HARO, either as a source or as a journalist? Will HARO make a significant dent in ProfNet’s market share?

Yammer 103: Coordinating Media Relations Idea Gathering

Among the benefits of Yammer is the ability to subscribe to, or “follow,” conversations or “tags” that you find interesting.

So instead of a mass e-mail going to 100 people in your department, you can Yammer with a tag, and only those people who are following that tag will get the e-mail.

Then they can respond by e-mail, and it all gets gathered, archived and redistributed through Yammer.

Here’s a practical example.

Suppose you have a geographically dispersed media relations team. You want to gather recommendations for potential subject experts for a story in an article you are writing for a publication.

Old Way #1: Send a mass e-mail to your whole department. Annoy most of the recipients with what they consider spam.

Old Way #2: Send an e-mail to a distribution list you have created, those who work in media relations. But no one who isn’t on your list gets the message, even if they might have something to contribute. The message is locked up in your recipients’ e-mail inboxes.

The Yammer Way: Go to Yammer and post your question with appropriate tags. It will look something like this as you enter it:

And in the Yammer timeline, it will look like this:

So, for colleagues who have followed the #press-call-alert or #media-relations tags, and who have their e-mail settings set appropriately, like this…

…will get e-mails sent directly to them. If they reply to the message, their responses also will be posted to Yammer.

The other benefit is that by being in the Yammer timeline, your message is available to others in your workplace, who may not have originally subscribed, but who might see that a conversation is occurring and decide to chime in.

And through Yammer tags, people subscribe to messages of interest to them. You don’t need to have someone maintain a master distribution list or, what’s worse, have each individual on the team maintaining his or her own distribution list. The lists maintain themselves in Yammer as people “follow” given tags.

The other benefit is that instead of having the info locked in e-mail inboxes, the Yammer site is searchable, creating a knowledge base for the workplace. But we’ll discuss that more in Yammer 104.

Assignments:

  1. If you are a Mayo employee in Public Affairs, click this #public-affairs link and see if you can get signed up for and have access to this Yammer tag. You also could try following #social-media-team, #medical-edge, #media-relations and #press-call-alert.
  2. If you are NOT a Mayo employee, I would be interested to find out what happens when you click those links in #1 above, or specifically whether you can see this particular Yammer. Part of the benefit of Yammer is that you can limit your updates to be only visible by your co-workers. If you can see mine (or if you can’t), I’d appreciate knowing that.

So let me know how this works for you in the comments below!

Add to FacebookAdd to DiggAdd to Del.icio.usAdd to StumbleuponAdd to RedditAdd to BlinklistAdd to Ma.gnoliaAdd to TechnoratiAdd to FurlAdd to Newsvine

Paying it Forward with a Small Good

Earlier this year I got a chance to meet Chuck Hester when we presented together at the Bulldog Reporter Media Relations 2008 Summit in San Francisco. Chuck’s story is about using LinkedIn for power networking, and he’s organized what he calls LinkedIn Live events to turn his local virtual network into a face-to-face networking opportunity.

I hope to see Chuck again this week at the Ragan Corporate Communications in a Web 2.0 World conference at the SAS headquarters in Cary, NC. I’m unfortunately going to be traveling during his presentation, but will plan to connect with him later in the conference.

Chuck is turning his experience with LinkedIn into a new book that will be released later this year. It’s called Linking In to Pay it Forward: Changing the Value Proposition in Social Media. You can read about it on Chuck’s Pay it Forward blog. So when Chuck asked me for the “Small Good” of giving his book a shout out, I was glad to help.

One of the things I appreciate about the social media world is the “pay it forward” philosophy. Much of what I’m doing with SMUG is experimenting publicly with different tools and techniques. Then, after I’ve worked out the kinks and gotten hands-on experience with the tools, I can confidently recommend the best ways to use them in my work environment. And I figure if I can help others by letting them learn from my experimentation, that’s a worthwhile service.

But I can’t experiment with everything; I personally haven’t used LinkedIn nearly as much as Facebook. So if Chuck would like to write a guest post with some highlights from his new book, I’d be happy to confer Associate Professor status and make him a SMUG faculty member.

Facebook Chat Will Enhance Business Utility

Now that Facebook‘s Chat function seems to be officially out of Beta and is deployed everywhere (if it’s on my network, it must be everywhere), I got a chance to try it today.

I haven’t been a big user of IM (Check that: at all.) This is completely new to me.

But I can see how Chat will be a strong addition that will make Facebook even more valuable for business networking, as Adam indicates. I think of it particularly in a PR/Journalist relationship. If you can see whether your journalist friends are on-line and can send them a quick message, that will be less interruptive than a phone call. If you continually send them worthwhile news tips or ideas, you can solidify the relationship. If you start abusing them with off-target pitches, they can un-friend you…or block you. It’s one more way Facebook can put the “relations” back in media relations.

I think this also has obvious applications for workplace collaborations…the ability to have conversations that are much more informal, back and forth, without the ponderous formality of e-mail.

“Can’t you just pick up the phone instead?” Of course. But just as my middle daughter (in particular) uses SMS text messaging to connect with her friends (and don’t get me started on how far she went over her monthly allotment of 300 in March) instead of getting into a long conversation, sometimes a more terse interaction is appropriate in the business world, too. And Facebook Chat could be a great way to do this.

In fact, I had a nice conversation with my son-in-law, Kyle, via Facebook Chat this morning (see above); I saw he was on Facebook and had the pleasure of introducing him to this new feature. Would I have thought to pick up my cell phone and call him? Highly unlikely. But when I saw he was on-line, we were able to have a chat that didn’t take a lot of time, but let us touch base.

I think Chat will likely cause me to keep my Facebook status more regularly updated, too. And I like how well Chat and Messaging are integrated. I was called from my desk during my chat with Kyle, and by the time I returned he had signed off. So instead of continuing the chat, I was given an option to send him a message in Facebook. This is a great way of blending the rapid interactivity of Chat with the asynchronous tools already built into Facebook.

Here’s a good Facebook Chat FAQ that outlines some of the current features for those of you who, like me, haven’t been IMers.

I hope you’ll try out Facebook Chat, and if you see I’m on-line, start a conversation. If you’re not my friend yet, you can add me here, and I’ll make you part of my Blog Friends list.

Which leads me to a set of feature requests and enhancements that would make Facebook Chat a really strong business networking tool. That will be the subject of my next post.

Mike Moran Keynote


Our luncheon speaker is Mike Moran from IBM, author of Do it Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules.

Mike opened with the great point that what we need to have the freedom to dip our toes into Social Media, and sip from a glass instead of drinking from the fire hose like Robert Scoble. We need to experiment and try things, becoming expert in what works for our employers and clients. Realize that most of what you do will fail, but that’s OK. Fail faster.

Now you can target even the smallest group. You can measure the results of everything you do. But the flip side is that you must change your message in response to what your customers Say (comments, blogs, product ratings) and Do (search, purchases, page views.)

It’s just as important to pay attention as it is to get attention.

Continue reading “Mike Moran Keynote”