On Talk Radio Mobilizing the Crowd

When discussing talk radio, many younger people refer to the common refrain that their father listens to it, the assumption being that talk radio is a thing of the past, out of touch with Generation Y (or whatever we’re called at this point).  Taking the line of thinking a bit further, most people would assume that social media has very little use in talk radio.

Here in New York, The Brian Lehrer Show, NPR and the non-profit WNYC’s midday New York-centric talk show, has bucked that conventional wisdom by motivating their listeners to contribute to the show’s projects,  in order to make New York City smarter, more connected and more community-like.

We’ve been listening to TBLS (we just coined that acronym, roll with it) off and on for about a year, but really picked up listening in the last six months since we started working from home (helps us pretend like we have office chatter around us).  When we first started listening, we expected it to be stuffy, get-off-my-lawn discourse among old, suburban retirees. However, we were engaged by the thoughtful, yet current talk about the city.

Since we started listening, TBLS has constantly tapped the wisdom of the crowd for a number of new media projects.  Most recently, the show has launched “It’s a Free Country”, the show’s political blog that “provide[s]…lively political content and partner[s] with [readers] to build a unique interactive community.“  The site includes daily quizzes about politics, a blog and a survey to get to know the community better, while fostering conversation among listeners.

Currently, the site is asking readers to submit their defining moments of the Bush presidency via YouTube, thus gathering multiple perspectives and finding moments that a singularsite editor may not have remembered or found significant.  The site also compiles other forms of multimedia with the mix of soundbites from the election.

Our personal favorite TBLS use of new/social media is the Map Your Moves project, when the show asked people to submit all their former addresses over the past few years to gain an aggregate look at where people move and why.  Once the data was collected, the show opened the information up to the community to then create visual representations of the data so we could all learn about why people move and where they move to.

Source: Andrea Stranger

The reason this projected succeeded is because it piqued people’s interests by offering a visualization of an activity that is essential to living in New York: moving. Everyone moves and we move to a million different places.  By seeing where and why other people move, the show helped develop a community by providing connections (not live, in-person connections, but a bond through sharing and learning about a common experience).

The show’s most recent social media project was the Marathon Meetup where runners were asked to submit their info if they needed someone to cheer for them and watchers picked runners to cheer for and attempted to meet up to provide extra encouragement.  The project was designed to connect strangers through another shared experience: the New York City marathon.

Of course, TBLS has the requisite Facebook and Twitter accounts which are de rigueur for this day and age, but the show has consistently used the Internet, power of the crowds and social and new media to extend beyond a two-hour radio format and develop a community.  Making a huge city like New York feel smaller is (bad pun alert) a large task, but The Brian Lehrer Show proves that an old-school medium like a talk show can use new and social media to bring New Yorker together.

Tags: Facebook, Map Your Moves, Marathon Meetup, New Media, NPR, Social Media, The Brian Lehrer Show, Twitter, WNYC

On P&G Embracing Fantasy Football

“How’d your team do this week?”

“I can’t believe I benched David Garrard’s 4 TDs for Aaron Rodgers.”

“If the refs didn’t blow the call on the Adrian Peterson touchdown, I would have won my week!”

Those quotes are guaranteed to have happened at some office around the country this Monday morning as millions of football fans gripe about a fake collection of players who they happen to “own” or at least believe owe them some sort of duty to perform as expected.  The weekly ritual is part of an estimated $800 million dollar fantasy football industry which causes grown men (and women! we have one woman in our league) to obsessively hit refresh on websites with numbers every Sunday.

Blogger Fantasy League Home

Fantasy football has taken over the sports world as a type of parallel football enterprise.  It happens at the same time as the NFL, involves the same players as the NFL, but causes fans’ focus and rooting interests to frequently  be drastically different than was typical five years ago.   However it exists, fantasy football draws intense passion from football fans, which is why Proctor & Gamble (PG) made a wise move to invite 12 sports bloggers to be part of its Blogger Fantasy League 2010.

While a company’s social media efforts are most frequently defined by their interaction on Twitter and Facebook, the Blogger Fantasy League draws on the less chic, but arguably more substantial form of third-party blog advocates to extend word of its products.

In the league, 12 prominent sports bloggers manage teams which are sponsored by Febreze, Gillete, Old Spice, Vick’s, Prilosec and P&G.  P&G, in conjunction with the NFL and NFL.com, invited each of the team managers to the NFL headquarters where they met with members of the NFL communication staff and other people in the league office to discuss football, the league and blogger relations.

Our touchpoints with the league come from Dan Levy, host of On the DL Podcast and editor of PressCoverage.us (same link) and Dan Shanoff, editor of DanShanoff.com, as we listen to or read both of them on a daily basis. When first hearing them talk about the league while disclosing all the material connections, we were a little jarred as neither Dan seems to be the type to shill for a product.  However, the partnership works because the discussion about the league was similar to their usual coverage, which is the key for Proctor & Gamble as it introduces the league through a channel that readers are interested in.

Each week, the team managers, per their agreement with P&G, need to discuss the league in at least one post per week.  They’ve taken to the coverage in ways similar to their usual coverage which makes the fit natural.  The payoff – and reason that they stay engaged – is the league winner gets a free trip to the Super Bowl this year.

The promotion is exceptionally smart because it taps fans’ enthusiasm and devotion to fantasy football as many people love talking shop about fantasy football and trading war stories about epic wins or bad beats (we have a rule with our friends: no talking about leagues that don’t involve the person you’re talking to).

Rather than pushing their promotional content onto readers through their own blog, P&G earn product reminders to many more people each week than would visit a corporate website.  The only contentions we have with the program is that the league isn’t open for the public to view and follow along with and there is no central home for the league with links to the participant sites other than the Facebook page.

Tags: Blogger Fantasy League, Blogs, Dan Levy, Dan Shanoff, Facebook, Fantasy Football, NFL, On the DL Podcast, Proctor & Gamble, Social Media, Twitter

On the Halloween Costume Manifesto

We’re not particularly fond of the holiday of Halloween – we like it all right – but what really gets a fire burning in us is the discussion about coming up with Halloween costumes.  After a lot of thought and, in particular, a lot of debate over the past weekend with friends regarding what we’re going to be for Halloween this year, we came up with the definitive rules for a killer – no pun intended – Halloween costume.

1. Nothing topical: Remember in 2008 when every girl you saw was Sarah Palin? Yeah, no one wants to be flanked by a million other unimaginative, brainless people who are wearing the same costume (we’re looking at you, Ironman).  Plus, if you go as something topical, there’s a 99% percent chance someone will wear it better than you.  Recent nominees for Lame Topical Costume include The Joker (2008), Amy Winehouse (2007) and the most ubiquitously poorly done one (at least in Brooklyn) from 2009: Max from Where the Wild Things Are.
2. No concepts: Overheard in every dorm in the country: “Wouldn’t it be hilarious to go as the ‘Walk of Shame?’” “OMG, you HAVE to go as that.”  Absolutely not. Concept costumes are almost always poorly executed and achieve only a slight shrug and shake of the head when explaining your costume to party goers.  Concept costumes are funny when talking about them, but disappointingly lame when followed through on.  Concepts are also the equivalent of laughing at your own joke and they’re absolutely the type of things that are funny to talk about, but less so when brought to life.
3. Be nostalgic, but not too obviously nostalgic: We get it, everyone thinks Super Mario, the Ninja Turtles, Doug Funnie and Legends of the Hidden Temple were cool. These costumes have been over used like a young pitcher on a Dusty Baker managed team.  The key is for fellow party-goers to say “Ooooh! I remember that” when you tell them what you are.
4. The 30/70 rule: 30/70 is the ideal ratio for your costume (hat tip to our friend Zach).  You want 30 percent of the people you encounter to get the costume right away and the other 70 percent to get it after you tell them.  For the costume to be effective, you need complete understanding and buy-in from everyone you encounter, but you don’t want to be so obvious that people recognize it immediately.
5. The only one: The golden rule of costumes is you want to be the only one at your destination with that costume.  If people are dressed in the same ‘stume as you, chances are they did it better than you, at which point you feel like a sucker.  We recently changed our costume idea this year to avoid this rule.

Taking all of these into account, we’ve deciding on our costume.  We were originally going to be spaghetti & meatballs (non-topical, nostalgic for dinner as a child, a tangible item, we’d guess the 30/70 applies) but then we found out someone at one of our destination was going as “spaghetti in a heap on the floor.” As a result, we’re going to be Alexander the Grape, everyone’s non-favorite, oft-forgotten candy from childhood.  We can only hope it tops our costume last year of Tetherball.

Tags: 30/70 rule, Alexander the Grape, Concept Costume, Costume, Halloween, Topical Costume

On Winter 2010-11 Music

We like to have an album be representative of the seasons (full post coming eventually about what albums have paired with certain seasons over the past few years).  While we’re still in Fall, we’re fairly certain that we can anoint How To Dress Well’s Love Remains album as our album of the winter (previous award winners go to The Antlers - Hospice, Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago and LCD Soundsystem – Sound of Silver).

In a winter album, we typically look for something dark and quiet, but with requisite texture and innovation to maintain our interest.  The Antlers’ subject matter, lyrics, storytelling and penchant for songs exploding wrap out attention while Bon Iver’s ability to make us feel like it was snowing outside was the sticking point for that album (and let’s be honest, every Brooklynite loved channeled their inner bedroom sensitivo and loved that album).

How To Dress Well (no link to their blog because it’s terribly designed) is the work of one man named Tom Krell.  The songs merge R&B rhytms with soft and distorted vocals.  The result is (and we’re suckers for this word and music that it describes) an ethereal sound.  Stereogum describes it perfectly: “whisper-close hazed-out bedsit ’90s R&B bullseyes.”

The album is perfect for dark, cold winter nights when we’re working on our Capstone and want to think it’s snowing outside to justify the solitary confinement when need to enforce to get the project complete.

Enjoy How To Dress Well’s “Lover’s Start:”

Tags: Album, Bon Iver, For Emma, Forever Ago, Hospice, How To Dress Well, Indie Music, LCD Soundsystem, Love Remains, Music, Sound of Silver, The Antlers, Winter Music

On the Push and the Pull of Social Media

Public relations is inherently a mix of the proactive and reactive.   The proactive outreach lets us show our chops in securing interviews, managing crises and promoting clients.  The reactive is simply easier because we have to expend less effort when opportunities fall in our laps.  However, being reactive can make us complacent and flat footed in instances where we need nimbleness.

Building an audience on social media can similarly require proactivity or a let-them-come-to-us approach.  In observing social media campaigns and discussion, we’ve come to the conclusion that there’s a magnetic-like middle status that repels social media accounts into either the come-to-us (pull strategy) or hunt-and-seek (push strategy) sides, with little able to survive in the middle ground.

Source: Jeffrey Beaill

At about the same time we were starting up a Twitter account for one of our clients (a small, Web 2.0 start-up that’s working hard to develop a following), Tim Tebow of the Denver Broncos also joined Twitter.  In minute, Tebow had racked up thousands upon thousands of followers who would cling to every forthcoming tweet.  Meanwhile, we were working hard to connect with a few hundred targeted, relevant followers.

What’s perverse about the situation is that Tebow most likely signed up for Twitter because it was “the thing to do” whereas we created an account with goals, strategies and objectives.  We wanted to use our Twitter account to connect with relevant people in our industry and engage them in conversation.

We used the account in all the right ways:

• We retweeted relevant tweets from our followers.
• We engaged people in conversation with @ replies.
• We shared links useful to our community.
• We posed questions to kick start conversation.

Yet we were still proactively working to build our audience.

Meanwhile, Tebow has tweeted 12 times in two months, only retweeting items about his foundation and one from Darren Rovell, the CNBC sports business reporter, about Tebow joining Twitter.  Yet, he’s got this eager, attentive and hungry audience for information from camp Tebow, and it’s all for naught if he doesn’t tweet.

We imagine this divide holds true for a lot of people.  Perhaps it’s more of a pyramid approach than a straight line split in building an audience, with the top tier able to gather followers while twiddling their thumbs compared to us hard working social media users.

Though it seems like an injustice, this social media dynamic isn’t so different from regular PR.  Facebook gets press for blowing its nose while competitors may struggle to gain coverage.  The difference is that the social media “have-nots” can see exactly what type of audience the social media “haves” enjoy.

The takeaway for PR people is to remember the times when they struggled to get audiences.  That way, they won’t take for granted the captivated followers they have when they grow to a large, come-to-us type organization.

Tags: Darren Rovell, Public Relations, Social Media, Tim Tebow, Twitter

On Words to Live By

via holy-moly: This is good advice. Grow beard….

Tags: Beard, Style

On the Internet Not Killing Print

From the Guardian:

A fascinating new piece of research this week looks in detail at the success of newspaper websites and attempts to find statistical correlations with sliding print copy sales. As one goes up, the other must go down, surely? These are the underpinnings of transition.

But “in the UK at least, there is no such correlation”, reports the number-crunching analyst Jim Chisholm. “This is true at both a micro-level in terms of UK newspaper titles and groups and at a macro-level comparing national internet adoption with circulation performance. Indeed, the opposite case could be argued: that newspapers that do well on the web also do better in print… Understandably worried traditional journalists should know that the internet is not a threat.”

via We thought the internet was killing print. But it isn’t | Media | The Observer.

This research might end up being the central point of our Capstone project.  We’ve contended that newspapers are having trouble explaining their value to regular consumers, especially as people are consuming more news.  The decline in newspaper subscriptions isn’t because people are going online (at least not totally) but instead that they can get similar – if not quite the same – information online from a substitute source.

 

Tags: Capstone, Internet, Media Industry, Print Media, The Guardian

On The Cool Before the Business

This quote is from the New York Observer story about Hashable.  We thought it was extremely accurate.  Thinking back onto the sites that have “made it,” most were buzz sites before getting any sort of business model together.

“In the post-Facebook world you have to be cool first. The business side of things comes much later.”

via Is This 21 Year Old Intern Really the Most Powerful Networker in New York? | The New York Observer.

Tags: Facebook, Hashable, New York Observer, Social Media

On This Economy

We’ve been saying “in this economy” to fill out nearly every sentence for awhile as a joke.  The New Yorker hopped on board that joke this week.

Source: The New Yorker

Tags: Cartoon, In This Economy, New Yorker

On Drawing the Line In Client Relations

In public relations, the client always comes first.  PR pros are supposed to be behind the scenes, never part of the story (this maxim is true for journalists but even more pertinent for PR).  We’re also supposed to do work for the client and deliver the results they desire, but what if those results are past the point of decency? What about past our ethical standards?

New York Jets PR staffer Jared Winley currently has to answer those questions following some actions that may or may not have happened in 2008.  Winley was intimated in a recent report by Deadspin to have facilitated some, ahem, racy interactions between then-Jets QB Brett Favre and then-Jets in-house reporter Jenn Sterger.

Brett Favre at Jets Training Camp. Source: Tom Sullivan

The report makes a tenuous link between Winley and the incidents by insinuating that he sent MySpace messages, on behalf of Favre, which told to Sterger  that Favre has seen her and wanted to meet her.  In subsequent messages, Maybe Winley sent Sterger a phone number which ended up as number that sent her pictures of Favre’s nether regions.

(Hypothetical alert: because we do not have confirmed details of Winley’s involvement, the discussion below is hypothetical based on the possibility that he was involved in the situation.)

The question then becomes, where do you draw the line in helping your client?  Clearly, sexually harassing anyone – never mind a fellow employee and media member – falls outside the scope of duty.  But, within the world of the locker room and servicing star athletes, is it possible Winley was temporarily blinded?

We’ve been in locker rooms and dealt with athletes in the past so we know that the culture in those four walls is different from outside.  However, the thought of facilitating that kind of interaction screams as an obviously heinous breach of the client-PR relationship.  Winley had to have known better.

On the flip side, he probably felt immense pressure.  Winley is – no offense to him and we’d say this about any team PR person – an interchangeable commodity.  PR staffers for the Jets presumably come and go, much like any other business.  Further, the PR team has no direct correlation with the team’s performance on the field.

Favre is the opposite of Winley: a once-in-a-lifetime type player. A Hall of Fame-bound quarterback who had the potential to drive the Jets to a Super Bowl.

The dichotomy between the two employees’ (Favre was a Jets employee) must have led to a stark gulf in power between the two.  We can imagine that if the star QB wanted, say, a pretty brunette he had seen on the sidelines, that the PR person (whose job it is to make Favre happy) could potentially feel a need to facilitate this interaction.  Plus, the locker room may have fostered an Ol’ Boys connection between the two that could have put more pressure on Winley.  ”C’mon Jared, it’s just one guy helpin’ another.  Can’t you be my wingman this once? I’d do the same for you.”

While most of us realize that this type of facilitation is a violation of client relations, the situation serves as a reminder to set boundaries with clients.  When a client requests something, we must remember that we’re there to serve them, but not at the expense of morals, ethics or law.  We also need to be wary about the subtle pressures of the job, demands from clients and changes in the work environment that may leads us to change our moral compass.

We certainly wish Winley the best and hope for his sake that the reports are erroneous.  We also hope that regardless of his involvement or lack of, the incident raises awareness for him and PR pros everywhere of the potentially slippery nature of the job.

Tags: Brett Favre, Client Relations, Deadspin, Jared Winley, Jenn Sterger, New York Jets, NFL, Public Relations