Well, it’s mostly enjoyable. Until I come across the sad case of media liaisons who don’t know how to do their job.

As an in-house communications director, I also worked that media liaison role, so I know how it’s supposed to work from both sides.

The job is to put out press releases and other marketing materials in the hopes of snagging a reporter’s interest. When calls come in from journalists, other skills come into play; the media liaison now has to talk to the reporter to get an idea of what the story is about to direct the call to the best in-house expert. There may also be a chance to tweak the focus of the reporter’s questions to highlight your company’s features.

It’s important to remember that even if the reporter isn’t looking for information directly related to your business offerings, just getting your name into a big magazine is advantageous.

Let me give you an example. We’ll say you run a clothing chain store named Harry’s Suits. A reporter calls and says he’s doing a story for Business News magazine that has a circulation of 1 million. The topic of the story is “in-store music that gets people to buy stuff”. Which do you think is the better response (below) from your media liaison, A or B?
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A) “I’m sorry, but I don’t think we can comment. It’s true that we do use in-store music in our stores to try to get our customers to buy things. But I can’t really say we’re in-store music experts. It’s certainly not part of my job. Anyway, our business is selling suits.

“Really, we can’t really speak as experts about in-store music because we don’t make the music. We’re not composers. In-store music isn’t really what we’re known for and it’s not what we want to be known for. But we’d be happy to give you quotes and information about our new line of suits that we have available. Otherwise, I don’t think we can help you.”

B) “Absolutely! We use music in our stores to try to get our customers to buy things. I’m afraid I don’t know much about it. But I think Joe Mavis in marketing knows the guy who selects the music for our stores. He can tell you who does that and what goes into the decision.

“I’ll get you his information. He might also have some good data on what kind of response we’ve had from in-store music as well, and which suits are our best sellers for different kinds of songs. Feel free to ask him about that.”
—
For the first response, the reporter will hang up and move on. And he’ll never call them back for another story because the media liaison was being obtuse.

For answer “B”, the reporter will get forwarded along to Joe Mavis or whoever and collect some quotes. Even though the story really isn’t focused on men’s suits, the story will probably include a quote like the following:

“We’ve definitely had better sales of our blue navy suits when we play jazz in the store,” says Director of Marketing Joe Mavis, with the Harry’s Suits clothing chain based out of New York City.

You’ve now got 1 million potential readers of the fact that Harry’s Suits sells blue navy suits and you can find their store in NYC and maybe even your own city. If the article goes online, that sentence might now come up in a search for clothing stores that sell suits. And if the writer was feeling particularly Web-2.0ish, he might even have inserted a hyperlink to the store website. And of course, the marketing people at Harry’s Suits would be free to blog, tweet, email and Facebook the hell out of the story.

That’s how a single line in a news article like this brings in leads for businesses all the time.

As you’ve probably guessed by now, while researching a story for a large-circulation business magazine, I got stonewalled for no good reason by a dumb media liaison because the story I was writing was not directly dealing with their particular service offering.

No big deal on my part — I have plenty of other sources who were only too happy to provide me with quotes. And maybe no big deal on their part, either. Maybe none of their potential customers were going to read that article — even though I suspect a good number would have (either in the original magazine, or perhaps excerpted on the company’s press page).

For the vast majority of companies (and I’m guessing this one, too), reporters are not banging down their doors everyday. If this is the way that this media liaison deals with all media requests — “either write about specifically about our awesome products and service offerings, or we can’t be bothered” — then they’re not doing their job. Instead of creating promotional opportunities, they’re wasting them.

That’s why someone needs to fire their media liaison.

This was in response to Vancouver Sun Managing Editor Kirk LaPointe’s remark that bloggers, Tweeps and Facebookers seemed to be missing niche opportunities. He pointed to the lack of resources “traditional” media outlets were throwing at the Vancouver Paralympic games, seeming to suggest that bloggers ought to fill the vacuum. A participant from the audience suggested another example, where coverage of the Olympics protests petered out significantly after the first day.

With all due respect to LaPointe and the lady from the audience, I think their critique misses the point. It’s true that some social media creators, a very slim minority, do develop entirely original investigative pieces that are on par with reporting by paid journalists. But the vast majority of social media content developers prefer to piggy-back on the efforts of traditional media, focusing on offering alternative opinion rather than alternative raw data. Individually and collectively, social media makers largely don’t have the resources to do anything else.

Sure, we create all kinds of original content, from photos and videos to really thought-provoking essay-type blog posts. But as a rule, we don’t pick our themes from whatever the newsmakers have deemed unworthy of their attention — at least, not if we want people to actually see what we’re creating.

Why didn’t more bloggers cover the rest of the Olympics protests? I suspect it was because most realized that the real story was the hundreds of thousands of happy patriots gathered in our public spaces and an outpouring of positive feeling — not a few hundred increasingly fractured and inarticulate protesters accompanied by masked thugs intent on useless violence.

Why aren’t more bloggers covering the Paralympic Games (NOTE: the lack of coverage is only relative to the Olympic Games that preceded it. Bloggers, like regular media, are covering these Games)? The stories of courage and overcoming adversity are there to be recorded in spades, perhaps even more than with our Olympic athletes. In their absence, sponsors, reporters, bloggers and the general public have once more indicated something a little bit ugly about our society. Perhaps that is the real story here.

The bottom line is that when traditional media does its job well of investigating and providing the raw stories, social media makers can then do their job of being the gateways to that content through hyperlinks and also providing alternative opinions. There are benefits going both ways.

It’s happening at 7 pm on Thursday, March 18 at the BOB Coworking Space in Vancouver’s Gastown District, 163 E. Pender Street.

Register for the event at http://smcyvrolympiclessons.eventbrite.com

See more information about this event below.

VANCOUVER OLYMPICS DEMONSTRATE BOTH GOOD AND BAD IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA
Local leaders in traditional and social media gather to discuss impact of social media on the 2010 Winter Olympic Games

VANCOUVER, BC – In the afterglow of the 2010 Vancouver Games, top BC media leaders will come together on March 18, 2010 to discuss the positive and negative impacts of both social and traditional media on the Games. The panel discussion will be held from 7-9pm at the BOB Coworking Space in Vancouver’s Gastown District, 163 E. Pender Street.

For more information about Social Media Club Vancouver, please contact Guacira Naves at g@onlinestrategy.ca, or visit http://smcyvr.com.

Marketing in it’s purest form is not about selling, it is simply a form of communication and as such is a neutral concept that can be used for good or for evil.

I’ve had newsletter subscribers tell me that even though they are not in business or marketing, they read my newsletters cover to cover and always find something that helps them. From the librarian who wants kids to know about the many fun, educational programs they can become involved in, to the kindergarten teacher who needs parents on board with her classroom policies, they find ideas on improving communication and getting better buy-in whatever their valuable, beneficial message.

Have you used a “marketing” tool or idea in a non-marketing context? I’d love to know about your experience. Leave a comment.

Blogs

The blog is often the essential tool of any social media campaign. You can use it to provide authoritative information, announce new things happening with your organization and link to things you’re doing elsewhere on the web. The blog is where you provide the authentic “voice” — or voices — of your organization.

As the most-frequently updated part of a website with fresh content, a blog is typically easier to find on Google than static web pages. It also is ready-made for facilitating discussion with your audience through a comments section, allowing your organization to obtain instant feedback from your fans, provide extra information and (as sometimes necessary) issue timely clarifications and corrections. There are many other benefits, but for now, suffice to say that the blog is the work-horse of many social media campaigns.

Twitter

Free instant messaging in 140 characters or less to your closest friends, whether you number them on one hand or in the hundreds of thousands. The PR benefits are obvious. One extremely important thing to remember about using Twitter for your organization is that you are often using it to connect with influencers who will spread your message to other channels.

Experienced Twitter users for organizations will often use their profiles as link-back machines to automatically promote content on their own websites, especially their blog content. In that case, think of the website as home-base, with your Twitter account inviting people back to your site to see what’s going on.

Facebook Fan Pages

Facebook Fan Pages are often set up as bulletin boards merely syndicating content from the main website. Actually, there can be value in this if updated regularly, since Google likes Facebook. If your website is having trouble competing in its niche to get on page one of searches, your fan page may be easier to find. That said, a more ambitious use of these platforms is to host contests, allow fans to post content that you might not want on the main site, or offer something special to your customers or supporters.

As with Twitter, a Facebook Fan Page will typically represent another spoke linking back to your hub, the main website.

YouTube Videos

YouTube is the most famous video-sharing site in North America. There are competitors, but if the point is for your video to reach as many eyeballs as possible, it makes sense to at least post one version of your video on YouTube. Use it to create educational clips, show interviews and demonstrate whatever it is your organization does. The medium is great for announcements, tutorials, advertisements — whatever you want to do.

Keep in mind that text is still king on the Internet, even when you’re working with video. With good descriptions and tags, more people will actually see your video.

Which Social Media Tools Should I Use for My Business?
As usual, I would remind my readers that social media is not the be-all and end-all of marketing tools. Direct-mail marketing, sign-boards, brochures and other “traditional” marketing tools also have their place.

First, figure out your target demographic. Next, focus on what it is you’re selling (whether that’s widgets, services or a charitable cause). Define your campaign. After that, you can start looking at the tools in your toolbox.

Be A Social Media Punk

* Content is king. Keep your articles and descriptions relevant and interesting. Cool flash graphics and streaming video are no substitute for bad text.

* Be authentic. If you’re going to use social networking platforms to reach a wider audience, you’re going to have to actually be social. Have real conversations.

Panel organizer Liz Gaige of Market Navigators also had some excellent points about ensuring you have clear goals about your marketing campaign. Given the nature of the seminar, it made sense for us to talk about social networking and SEO, though Liz was quite correct to point out that more traditional marketing methods such as print advertising placements, direct mail marketing and other tactics also still have a place in any marketing toolkit.

One topic I also pursued was the ease of syndication of content. I’m a big believer in the ability of social networks to extend the reach of messaging. Blog posts become RSS-fed tweets, which become Facebook fan-page status updates, LinkedIn updates, and more. With a few quick emails or phone-conversations, or just by filling a form, you can make arrangements to get your content streamed to high-profile websites and media sites. Sure, Google will downgrade duplicate content, so you’ll need to tweak your headlines and your lead paragraphs a bit to prevent that from happening.

Finally, I also stressed the importance of building links back to your site and making sure those links go back to the right page. Remember, your social networks are just hooks to bring eyeballs back to your anchor website where you can change minds, evangelize and most likely, try to sell stuff. When you run campaigns, you may want to link back to custom-designed landing pages rather than a home page or other section. This makes it easier to track metrics in Google Analytics (or whatever else you’re using to track hits).

I’m looking forward to presenting alongside these very talented women again sometime. If you were present at the event or have any other questions (or comments) about driving traffic to your online store, go ahead and leave a comment. Cheers.

So if you are a blogger in Vancouver and you’re looking to share some war stories or just learn from others who have achieved some small measure of success in this upside-down crazy world of new media, join the Vancouver Blogger Meetup group and come on out.

Whether you’re blogging for business, for fun or some mix of both, I can guarantee you’ll learn something at these events and probably have a lot of fun to boot.

Hope to see you there.

Don’t get tricked or traded into a blogger sweatshop!