PR | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Social Media Strategy

Our presenters for the session on “How to Craft a Powerful, Cost-Effective Social Media Strategy” are Sally Falkow from Expansion Plus and Brian Solis from Future Works PR. This is a standing-room-only session.

I had seen this quote before, but apparently it came from Jay Rosen: “We are the people formerly known as the audience.”

Social Media Marketing is the use of the social tools to interact with people, but it is not about technology. It is sociology. It’s about being able to create content and interact with people.

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PR in Today’s New Marketing Milieu

I’m in the afternoon sessions at Media Relations 2008, for a presentation by Dr. Georg Kolb (formerly of Text 100) and Frank Shaw from Waggener Edstrom Worldwide.

Update: Here is Georg’s presentation from Slideshare.net:

Georg sees three major trends contributing to creation of what he calls “New Publics.”

Individualism – on the societal level, we today don’t believe as much in institutions as our ancestors did. Instead of the stability of family and extended families, he says, “we’re a mess.” Living all over the place. Patchwork families. Today we build trust by talking to people like ourselves. Instead of just taking the word of our personal physician as our grandparents would, we may also get second and third opinions, and also opinions of other patients.
P2P Networks – Peer-to-peer networks exist now through technology to make it practical for us to find and connect with people like us.
Niche Markets – A super-fragmented marketplace of groups of peer networks.

Georg talked about how much discussion is happening outside the mainstream media dialogue. For example, you may have an employee group organized within Facebook. This is a sphere of influence you need to learn to navigate. Georg says four basic principles should help:

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Bulldog Reporter on Facebook, Twitter

I’m attending the Bulldog Reporter Media Relations 2008 Summit at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco today and tomorrow, and tomorrow I will be part of a panel about using Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks. Our focus is particularly on media relations applications, but I’m sure that some of our participants will be relatively new to social networking sites, so we’ll touch on some other uses for social networking sites, too.

Thanks to Critical Mention, I believe we will have wireless internet in the meeting rooms, so I’ll be live blogging as many of the sessions as I can.

One way I like to do this at conferences is by setting up Facebook groups, so attendees can experience social networking first hand, without leaping in and setting up a brand “fan” page. So I’ve set up a Bulldog Reporter Media Relations Summit 2008 Facebook group. This will be an opportunity for attendees and exhibitors to continue their networking after the summit is over.

I’m less experienced a live-Tweeting through Twitter, but will be using the hash tag #mr2008 for my Tweets. For more information on hash tags, see this fan wiki. I also understand I can get live updates from other Tweeters by using track mr2008 (provided any others use that same tag.) If I find out that others are live blogging or Tweeting and using other tags, I’ll post those, too.

The conference agenda looks great, with continental breakfast starting in about five minutes. Time to grab some coffee!

Media Relations 2008

I’m heading back to San Francisco tomorrow, for the second time this year. I’ll be attending Bulldog Reporter’s Media Relations 2008 conference. Here’s the schedule, which looks really interesting. I’m part of a panel on Tuesday called “Getting Personal:Telling your Story in Social Media: Facebook, LinkedIn and More.”

Seems kind of weird to have two colons in a program title. Is that even allowable in English?

I hope to be liveblogging many of the sessions, wireless access permitting. I’m particularly looking forward to:

Keynotes by Robert Scoble, Charlie Rose and Duncan Wardle (from Disney theme parks)
Katie Paine’s session on measuring online media impact
Other technology, new media, social media sessions
Mike Moran from IBM’s address called “Doing it wrong quickly: What corporations need from PR in Today’s Transforming Marketplace” also looks provocative.

I’ll be sharing highlights here.

SMUG Extension Class in Green Bay

I’m on Packerland Drive in Green Bay at the corporate headquarters of Schneider National, a transportation firm with lots of orange trucks, for the monthly meeting of the NE Wisconsin chapter of the Public Relations Society of America.

Here are the slides I used for my presentation, which was entitled Not Your Father’s Media (Yet).

Here are five immediate steps the PRSA members can take to dive into social media:

Comment on the presentation in the post below, and ask any questions we didn’t get to cover.
Join Facebook and “friend” me.
Sign up for Twitter and “follow” me.
Sign up for Google Reader, take the tour, and subscribe to some RSS feeds (including SMUG’s). If you want it by old-fashioned e-mail, get that here.
Enroll in SMUG by joining the Facebook group.

This should all maybe take another 30 minutes or so to get started, but it hopefully will launch you on a lifetime of social media exploration.