#FollowFriday for March 5th
Okay, full disclosure: I got this idea from Jeff Mello (@JeffMello) who was doing his Follow Fridays in blog post form a few months ago. Now he’s off doing crazy cool things with Force Marketing, going to #SXSW, and rocking the social media sphere. So since he’s been busy, I’m stealing borrowing this Follow Friday blog post practice in his honor.
My #FollowFriday list for March 5th, 2010: These are the people I’ve had some great interactions with over the last week on Twitter and in real life (in many cases both).
Ellen Rossano – @EllenRossano
Ellen was an amazing speaker at last night’s PRSSA meeting. I met her back in January at MassInnovation Night 10 (#MIN10), and she was more than happy to offer advice to our group. She owns and runs Crisis Media Consultants, and crisis communication was a perfect topic for the BU students who are having a midterm exam storm this week. It was refreshing to hear her speak to us; not at us. Last night’s conversation was one of the best PRSSA meetings this year.
Todd Defren – @TDefren
Todd is the genius behind SHIFT Communications and PR-Squared.com. He spoke to Professor Steve Quigley’s New Media and PR class this morning. During our Q&A I asked Todd about how the transition from tactical skills to management skills in the PR industry works. I thought he pointed out an interesting fact about the PR industry: If you stick with the grunt work, you can reach management positions fairly quickly. Some industries take 15 years of grinding away before a promotion, but in PR, you can be a VP by age 26! That’s what Todd says, and it’s pretty upbeat response, so I’m going to go with it.
Lisa Braithwaite – @LisaBraithwaite
I’ve been doing research and development for my speech consulting side job, and I stumbled across Lisa. She’s got an amazingly transparent and honest presence online. From the looks of her website, she’s been really innovative in developing the services she offers. I’m learning a lot reading her blog!
Jason Davis – @Jason_J_Davis
Jason has been a Twitter friend of the TalentCulture interns for a while now. Jason is going on vacation in a couple of weeks and asked me to guest blog in his absence. Watch for my post on HRThinkTank March 17th. He’s also looking into getting together an unconference, which I can’t wait to be a part of.
Mary Ann Halford – @MaryAnnHalford
I finally tweeted through an entire #pr20chat on Tuesday night. I’m glad I did because I got to meet Mary Ann! Mary Ann works for a very cool company called Bizworks360 that specializes in social media content strategy. Too bad the company’s in New York because I’d really like to apply to a place like that!
Meg Blauvet – @MegBlauvet
I was surprised to learn that Meg is changing her intended major from journalism to PR. Whatever she ends up doing, she’s coming from a really good place: Inside Boston, the student-run news magazine show I’ve been involved with for the past three years. The show’s in good hands regardless of whether or not Meg sticks around, but I hope she does. She’s new to Twitter so give her a warm welcome!
The TalentCulture Crowd
Marguerite Granat – @MGRecruiter
I must be making an impression on at least some of these HR folks I’ve been meeting through TalentCulture because Marguerite made me her #1 #followfriday this week! Marguerite is a strategic level-contract recruiter based out of Colorado. She writes PeakHistory.com and more of her articles will be rolling onto the TalentCulture blog very soon.
Jacqui Barrett-Poindexter – @ValueIntoWords
Jacqui is one of our contributors on the new TalentCulture blog. She’s the top resume writer in the country, and I can’t thank her enough for taking time out of her day to help me. She’ll be sharing some brilliant insight on the TC blog coming up, and I encourage everyone to read her articles.
Meghan M. Biro – @MeghanMBiro
I don’t want it to look like I’m sucking up to my boss here, so I’ll keep this short and sweet. Meghan and I have been collaborating behind the scenes as the puppet masters of the TalentCulture blog. It launched this week, and we are thrilled with the response so far. Congratulations to Meghan, my fellow interns @KLTaggart and @CaraKenefick and the TC contributors! More exciting things are on the way from TalentCulture.
The PRSSA Stars
Rachel Sprung – @RSprung
Rachel did an incredible job co-coordinating the #PRAdvanced: Brand Yourself conference with @ChelseaAlexan. The event was amazing! Read my recap of it. Rachel is a guinea pig for my speech consulting business; I’m looking forward to her feedback and hopefully a testimonial!
Ginny Soskey – @GSosk
Ginny is a PRSSA freshman who caught the personal branding bug at #PRAdvanced last weekend. She’s helping me plan the BU Social Media Competition and BU PRSSA Tweet-Up, and she’s been so patient and so helpful. Read her new blog. Keep her on your radar.
Maurice Rahmey – @MRahmey
Last week, Mo was a Twitter non-believer. Then he went to #PRAdvanced and started tearing through Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crush It. Now, he is tweeting up a storm about everything from viral videos to buying the NY Yankees. He’s scheming up a blog, and I have a feeling he’ll be “crushing it” very soon.
Laura Flanagan – @lauramflanagan
Laura is the ballsiest BU freshman I’ve ever encountered. She shook up the MS&L reps at #PRAdvanced last weekend by calling them out on their juniors-and-seniors-only internship policy. I wouldn’t be surprised if they considered changing it. She’s blogging now, tossing up some pretty creative posts about branding. I enjoyed reading her instructions on “How to Look Good Naked.”
The Missing Tower Media Team
Amanda Grinavich – @AGrinavich
On top of the fact that she was pretty much offered a job at SHIFT yesterday and the fact that she’s my leading source of hockey news, Amanda is part of a newly-formed kick-butt new media education team with me. We think we’re calling it Missing Tower Media. More details to come on that later.
Lauren Brown – @laurlita
You have to give Lauren credit for working full-time and blogging and taking Media Relations with me. She’s on the Missing Tower team too, and I think all of our members are looking forward to her insights from her internship at HubSpot. She’s going to be on the PR trip to NYC next week with me as well.
DJ Capobianco – @DJCap
“Hi my name is DJ, and I have an opinion on everything.” I don’t really need to say much more except I’m really looking forward to having DJ on the Missing Tower team.
Mark Nolan – @mahhkk
Mark is the analytics specialist on the Missing Tower team. We were tweeting each other at the #PRAdvanced conference last weekend, and I was glad to finally meet him in person today.
Mariam Shahab – @MShahab
I’ve been in on a few group projects in my Media Relations class with Mariam. She’s one of the most down-to-earth people I’ve ever met–very in touch with what’s going on in the PR world too. I can’t wait to work with her on the Missing Tower team.
#PRAdvanced was a hit!
Over the weekend, our PRSSA chapter hosted its PRAdvanced: Brand Yourself Conference. The event was a huge success, it was our largest Regional Activity ever with over 175 participants. Guest speakers from JetBlue, Dunkin’ Donuts, Brazen Careerist, Come Recommended, the Boston Red Sox, and more spoke on personal and corporate branding. There was also a career fair and an HR panel.
As you can see, we were very excited last week in the days leading up to what some called “the best regional activity ever:”
My favorite part of the conference w
as the HR panel. Our president Rachel Sprung monitored the panel and taking question from the audience via Tweetdeck. Talk about new media enhancing in-person experiences!
My phone died this week. May it rest in peace. I seriously think all of the tweeting via text finally did it in. But there were some great conversations happening on the hashtag. I couldn’t just sit and watch.
I’ve noticed a lot of blog posts recapping the event were thrown up this week. Here are some of the ones I found:
- “PR Advanced: Brand Yourself” by Rachel Sprung – She does a nice job of summing up the event and some of the highlights.
- Laura Flanagan took the plunge into personal branding with her first blog post “Step 1: Attend BU PRSSA Brand Yourself PR Advanced Regional Conference.”
- Ginny Soskey is ready to binge on personal branding too with her post “Branding Yourself: PR Advanced Conference Wrap-Up.”
- “Branding Yourself – PRAdvanced Conference” by Emily Forrest – Emilie focuses on lessons from a breakout session by Karen Raskopf of Dunkin’ Brands.
- Emilie O’Toole gives a few major lessons for personal branding. “Branded: Takeaways from PR Advanced 2010″
- I really like the skills assessment in Ellie Botelho’s post “Branding Myself.” I’ve got to get working on a skill assessment of my own.
Thanks to all who attended. The responses have been overwhelmingly positive, and our hashtag #PRAdvanced was a trending topic in Boston!
The TalentCulture blog is live!
For the last three-four months, I have been working hard behind the scenes at my internship consulting on our blog design and creating some of our web pages. Meghan M. Biro and Lisa Simons were the other brains behind the operation.
We’ve assembled a talented community of contributors from all over the country. We’ve got start-up experts, hiring pros, resume writers, HR marketers, college students, fresh graduates and everyone in between. We’ll be blogging, podcasting, posting videos and making multimedia content centered around a variety of topics: Careers, Culture, Digital Media, Green and Sustainability, Innovation.
Now, all of our hard work is public. Check us out. Subscribe to our RSS feed. Read my first post “Treat Your Job Search like a PR Campaign.” I’m so excited for this opportunity to contribute to the community and enhance my personal brand!
PR Students respond to E!’s new show “SPINdustry”
Last night, E! debuted a new show about a celebrity PR agency called Command PR.
While I can find plenty of reasons never to watch this show again, I realize that the agency of air headed, high strung, high maintenance, super diva PR practitioners pulled off a successful event in the first episode. They landed photos and feature stories in a handful of major magazines. I’ll give them props for that.
Is the show itself interesting? I don’t know. I’m in PR and it bored and annoyed me. I think it makes PR look bad, but a lot of PR practitioners aren’t even calling what they do “PR” anymore anyway. So I don’t think people will be protesting about it the way Italian Americans were about Jersey Shore.
Someday when I’m a celebrity, I won’t hire this firm. There’s just too much drama. The whole company seems like it could fall apart at the next snappy retort or half-baked question or (dare I say) exposed breast. This show isn’t a lesson on bad PR; it’s a lesson on how not to manage employees.
Here’s what some other rising PR stars thought:
“I thought SPINdustry or ‘Command PR’ basically made a mockery out of PR. Like Kell on Earth, it depicts the profession to be run by unassured incompetent people. PR is all about image, it irks me to think that these people don’t see what they are depicting about themselves, and about PR. The ownersor VP’s didn’t lift a finger during that episode. They had the “connections” but that was it.” – Yanique Shaw (@YaniquePR) is the president of Salem State University’s PRSSA Chapter and a good friend of mine from #PRSSANC in San Diego. Read her fashion and PR blog “YaniquePR – Everything.”
“SPINdustry shows PR professionals as materialistic and ditsy. I know I could never trust that staff. They do not seem competent. You would think as PR professionals, they could create an image for themselves that doesn’t promote stereotypes.” – Dan Chizzoniti (@DanChiz) a driven future PR star currently doing a lot of cool social media work at his internship for Schneider Associates. He blogs about all things pop culture, PR and entertainment on DanChiz.com.
Care to share your opinion? Comment below or email your reaction to me at EricLeist@gmail.com and I’ll post it here.
Building a Miracle Team
The 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team
The only class I’m taking this semester that really engages my interests is my Organizational Behavior course. We’re assigned to student teams for a semester-long project to study a local company or organization and how it functions.
A team, according to our course definition is “a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, set of performance goals and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.”
We just read a white paper by Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith, authors of The Wisdom of Teams. In it, they argue that teams should be selected on skill and skill potential and not on personality. I pride myself on being a Myers-Briggs personality type ISTJ because I like making decisions based on hard facts and objective viewpoints. But I disagree with Katzenbach and Smith. I think personality plays a huge role in how well a team functions an performs.
High-performing teams focus on personality. Individual personalities on a team have to fit delicately together like a jigsaw puzzle. Herb Brooks had the right idea when he coached the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team to a miracle gold medal. The winter Olympics are this week so I think the time is right to take a look at his team.
Brooks (played here by Kurt Russell in Disney’s 2004 film Miracle) made his players take personality tests before assigning them positions in his lineup. He defied the failed pattern of Olympic embarrassment by proclaiming that all-star teams fail because they rely solely on the skill of the individual. He wasn’t looking for the best players; he was looking for the right ones. Sure, he saw the “complementary skills” and “skill potential” Katzenbach and Smith mention, but he cared way more about individual personal dynamics than the two authors recommend.
Who’s right? Herb Brooks’ team won a gold medal. Just saying.
I’ve never been a fan of large organizations, companies and (especially) governments because I frequently see decision makers screw up when they are so far removed from the lower levels of management.
These fault-filled bureaucracies often frustrate employees by making them feel that “the man upstairs doesn’t know what’s going on down here!” Indeed boardrooms, financial statements and policy meetings are extremely different than assembly lines and low-level cubicles, so unless “the man” comes downstairs to have a look around every now and then, how would he know what’s going on?
I’m a student at Boston University, and I’ve been surrounded by uproar this school year from both students and faculty at the budget cuts the university made restricting students’ printing on-campus. The University forced restrictions on the number of pages students are allowed to print free of charge and the number of printing labs for students. These changes have left many members of the BU community wondering if the decision makers upstairs really know what’s going on down here.
Internal communications snafus are everywhere. So when I saw previews for CBS’s post-Super Bowl premiere “Undercover Boss,” I thought, “This is great.” But I also realized how this show just proves how much of a problem internal communication gaps are! Can you imagine working for a company and not knowing what your CEO looks like? I would like to think that if I were working in a large organization, I would recognize the CEO if he/she came to me pretending to be a new worker bee.
Then I think that if this guy…
walked into one of my classes pretending to be a professor, I wouldn’t think anything of it. When he didn’t understand students’ weekly schedules, I would shrug it off and chalk it up to him being another academically-minded teacher. This is Boston University’s President Robert Brown, and I have never seen this man before in my life.
I don’t want to make him out to be the bad guy. I’m sure he wasn’t the only one making the printing decisions. His university is just another victim of current management trends.
I hope “Undercover Boss” draws some attention from executives. The first episode featured Larry O’Donnell, COO of Waste Management cleaning toilets, driving garbage trucks, and learning “a heck of a lot” in the process. When his undercover stint was over, he said “I didn’t realize the impact [I had]. [These policies] came right from my office…I had no idea.” He vowed to fix the problems he witnessed. Maybe the “faces” of these large organizations will become more recognizable someday soon.
My Blog: It’s Alive!
After a 3-month hiatus, my blog and e-portfolio is back up and running. I took it down for a couple of reasons. First and foremost the platform I was using before was unreliable and suffered from constant technical issues. WordPress, I find, is much more dependable.
Secondly, I realized that I had some branding issues. I classified myself as a “Future PR Star” on my old blog. I went to a PRSSA National Conference in San Diego in November and realized that the reputation that comes with “PR” isn’t something with which I want to brand myself. Too often people think “media relations” when they think “PR.” That’s not me. Yes, I want to establish and maintain mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics. That’s “PR” by textbook definition. But times have changed for those two letters, and the reputation hasn’t kept up. Now we call what I want to do terms like “marketing,” “social media marketing,” “corporate communication,” and dozens more.
“PR” has expanded, so my personal brand needed a face-lift. One of my favorite PR professors asked on the first day of class, “Why are you here? You want to be hacks? Flacks? Spindoctors? Liars? That’s what people say when you tell them you’re in PR.”
No; I don’t want to be any of those things.
My goal with this newly redone blog and e-portfolio: Establish myself as a credible and experienced communicator with a passion for content creation and new media marketing. So check in on me every now and then. I just might accomplish that goal.
Imma Letchu Finish
There have been only two experiences in my life when I literally couldn’t believe my eyes. The first incident happened when I was 3 years old and my parents took me to a 3-D nature show in Disney World. The second occurred last week when I saw the video of Kanye West stealing Taylor Swift’s spotlight moment on MTV’s website. I thought, “This can’t be real.”
The more I hear about this incident, the more I doubt it’s sincerity. Even now, I am a disbeliever, and my partially-trained PR mind is drawing the line between reality and publicity stunt.
First, understand that award shows are what one of my professors calls “pseudo-events.” They aren’t actual events. They only exist for the PR bonanza surrounding them. The Academy Awards only exist because in the 1930s, the Academy wanted to drive people to the movie theaters. Add in the hours of press coverage that go into these shows: the wardrobe designers, the red carpet parties, the advertising revenue, thousands of entertainers packed into a theater to honor each other. You have a pseudo-event.
The very fact that Kanye’s little stunt happen at a pseudo-event makes me doubt its validity.
Second, Viacom instantly shifted into profit mode as soon as Kanye gave that mic back to Miss Swift. Consumers started uploading the clips of the exchange to YouTube as quickly as Viacom ripped them off the videosharing site. Maybe Viacom is a fast-acting organization, but maybe they knew what was coming and were ready for it. The only place you can see the video is on mtv.com, surrounded by two fat advertising spaces.
Finally, look at the attention both artists have gained from their interaction. I’m sure iTunes sales for both artists shot up after the VMAs, perhaps for more reasons than this one. Attention. Attention. Attention. During the show, Kanye and Swift were both trending topics on Twitter.
Could it be that multiple parties take advantage of a highly publicized and controversial incident? Sure. But I believe it is also possible that one or more parties planned Kanye’s interruption and banked on reaping the benefits.
The Di$ney Formula
I just saw this video by The Onion posted on Facebook. It’s a satire, of course, but there is an underlying truth to Disney’s magical marketing. Disney seems to have developed a formula for child star success. The conglomerate uses multiple channels (television, radio, the Internet) to promote its stars.
If you watch for a progression in Disney Channel shows over the past six or seven years…you won’t see one. The shows are variations of each other with similar sitcom-like situations played out in various environments. The characters in each show follow archetypal Disney formulas. Can you blame the writers, directors and producers? Kids and young teens love the Disney stars. They scream for Miley Cyrus concert tickets, wish to wave a wand on Waverly Place, and dream of being adopted as the fourth Jonas sibling. The formula works.
My question is, “For how long?” We saw record companies perfect a formula for selling CDs with the rise of the late-nineties boy band craze. That formula peaked when *NSYNC’s album No Strings Attached sold 2.4 million records in the first week. Internet-based peer-to-peer file sharing programs brought that industry to a screeching halt. Never again will so many CDs be sold so quickly.
The Long Tale author Chris Anderson says the marketing formula that sold the *NSYNC albums was extremely similar to the one that made Elvis so popular in the fifties: sell sexed-up young men to eager young women. So a change in demographic-tastes had nothing to do with the downfall of the CD industry; rather, technology made more variety and versatility available to music lovers.
So will the Disney formula last forever? If not, when will technology (or something else) force the Disney “Imagineers” to imagine something new?
District 9 Movies Rolled Into 1!
This week, I went to see “District 9.” After reflecting on it for a bit, I saw that the movie’s downfall has some valuable lessons about the unity of messaging. It’s failure to appeal to a single mass audience by blending different movie making styles provides further evidence for the need to segment audiences.
Synopsis
(I’ll try to do this without giving too much away, though I wouldn’t recommend this film to anyone who isn’t a blood relative of the cast members.)
District 9 chronicles the story of a government agency’s attempt to relocate over a million aliens living in a fenced-off district near Johannesburg, South Africa. We follow Wikus, a well-meaning and naive agent heading up the operation. The film documents the historic removal of the alien mothership and the events leading up to it.
What’s wrong?
The movie has multiple personality disorder. It begins as a documentary, sprints into an action film, flirts with being a love story, and then jumps back to documentary-style. At first, I thought this movie was going to provide a thoughtful commentary about who we are and how we treat each other. It changes its mind away from that goal about 20 minutes in, though.
So what?
Some people like mockumentaries. Some people like action. Some people like both. The lesson learned is that you can’t mix and match elements of different previous successes to create your own. That’s what “District 9″ tries to do, and it fails. It is the result of too many creative people sitting in a room dreaming up a screenplay without a down-to-earth realist to keep things in balance. Is it entertaining? Yes. Are the special effects great? They’re spectacular. Does it deserve to be at the top of the box office? Sure. But it will be soon forgotten; stashed away from movie greatness with the likes of “Cloverfield” and Spielberg’s “AI.”
What if…
The movie got me thinking about what it would be like to release several cuts of the same movie. What if “District 9″ came out as one cut true to the documentary-style through and through and was showing in the theater next door as the action movie. Like the college website that has different landing pages for different audiences, (students, parents, athletes, alumni, etc.) what if “District 9″ created the same story with different genres to appeal to different crowds. Might the movie be just as significant? Maybe. Might it make more money as well? Possibily. I would pay to see both versions after seeing the first one. I suspect others might too.
I’m not trying to change the movie industry here, I’m just asking “what if?”
I'm an Emerging Technology Strategist, freelance social media consultant, and recent grad of Boston University. I'm into marketing, emerging tech, content creation, speaking, writing and communicating. In my free time, I am a speech coach and amateur chef.
