Tag: media relations

Facebook and LinkedIn in Media Relations

This morning I have the pleasure of presenting at the Bulldog Reporter Media Relations Summit 2008 in San Francisco. My co-presenters are Chuck Hester from iContact and Valerie Jennings from Jennings PR. Chuck will be focusing on LinkedIn (here’s his profile, and mine), while I will do the Facebook portion (please feel free to “friend me.”) Valerie will wrap it all up.

If Chuck and Valerie want to upload their presentation to Slideshare.net (a site you should check out), I will be happy to embed here. Meanwhile, here’s mine:


I’m including below links to some of the web sites I will reference in the presentation, so you can see the actual sites (vs. the screen shots in Slideshare) and relive the magic.

I will revise and extend, but here’s the basic presentation. Here are some of my earlier writings that outline some of the potential I see for media relations through Facebook.

Putting the “Relations” in Media Relations

“Cheers” for Medical News

Toward a Medical News Community

I believe that with the long-awaited granular privacy settings Facebook has implemented, this will become much more practical. People will use Facebook increasingly for business when they are able to more effectively segregate what information is available to their professional contacts and what is more personal. I’ll be writing more about that soon.

Scoble Media Relations 2008 Keynote

I’m blogging from the front row of Bulldog Reporter’s Media Relations 2008 Summit, as Robert Scoble begins his keynote. I like how Robert starts his presentations by gauging the experience of the audience, so he can speak at a level that will be meaningful to them.

Robert says Web 3.0 is “the death of the page.” An example is Twittervision. He’s giving the group (more than half of whom haven’t been in Twitter) a tour of his life. Most of them haven’t seen FriendFeed either. Robert is on 20 different services in what he calls “the social media starfish” and Friendfeed brings them together. Here is his FriendFeed and here is mine.

Robert is using Sliderocket for his presentation, which is an online version of Powerpoint. It allows collaborative editing. It’s like a wiki for presentations.

Scoble uses Google Reader for reading his RSS feeds to create “a river of news.” Techmeme tells him the big stories. The thing that just changed in Google Reader a few months ago is the addition of friends, which lets people share news.

He talked about “the friend divide” which means that people who are new to a service aren’t going to get as much value out of it because they don’t have a lot of friends yet. The solution: Get friends.

Upcoming.org is another site for seeing what is…you guessed it…upcoming.

Robert closed with a demonstration of Qik, which live streams video from his cell phone. It’s a TV station in your pocket. The minute he turns off his cell phone it becomes a recorded archive on the Qik site. It only works with Nokia phones right now, I think.

Robert’s take-away: The word-of-mouth network is hyper-efficient. Even in the 1980s when he worked at a camera store, 80 percent of his sales came from word-of-mouth. With the web today, it’s a world-wide network for word-of-mouth. That’s what I’ll be talking about at my presentation.

Go to the Bulldog Media Relations group to see more of the pictures from Robert’s presentation.

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!

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:

  1. Comment on the presentation in the post below, and ask any questions we didn’t get to cover.
  2. Join Facebook and “friend” me.
  3. Sign up for Twitter and “follow” me.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.