This afternoon, Tony Clement, the President of the Treasury Board and the Minister responsible for Open Government in Canada held a TweetChat as part of his consultation on Open Government. I captured what to me was the main line of discussion via Storify. Enjoy.
Category Archives: public relations
What is PR?
What do you think public relations is? For the past thirty years, the Public Relations Society of America has defined it as follows: ”Public relations helps an organization and its publics adapt mutually to each other. Hunh?!?
The PRSA recognizes that this definition may not be meaningful to many people. It is surely outdated even for those who subscribe to it.
Gini Dietrich, Martin Waxman and I talk about the PRSA’s initiative to develop a new definition of public relations on this week’s Inside PR.
I’m not sure that they PRSA’s “fill in the blanks” crowd-sourcing approach will yield the type of definition that truly reflects the enhanced role of PR in the era of social media. Sadly, I think it lends itself to a “we act on people” definition, not the “we are part of something” perspective that is more appropriate to the age of social media.
Hopefully, my fears are misplaced and the PRSA will come up with something much more sophisticated. To do so, they need look no farther than the definition developed by the Canadian Public Relations Society. The CPRS defines public relations as “the strategic management of relationships between an organization and its diverse publics through the use of communication to achieve mutual understanding, realize organizational goals and serve the public interest.” In my opinion that’s a much better definition.
Gini Dietrich suggests that whatever definition is adopted, it will only be useful if it can be readily understood by the general public. And she believes that right now most people believe that PR amounts to little more than media relations.
I agree. Seeing PR as media relations is too restricting. It puts the PR industry in a small box within marketing or communications. A more expansive definition is needed that captures PR’s full role in the era of social media and meaningful online relationships.
Martin argues that the public relations profession should define itself through the lense applied by Jeff Jarvis when he asserts that “In a world of publicness which allows us to connect to each other, to information to actions and to transactions, links, i.e. linking up, help us organize new societies and redefine our publics.”
You can listen to our full discussion on Inside PR
Jeff Jarvis’ Public Parts Launch at Third Tuesday Toronto Storyfied
Further to my previous post, I’ve “Storyfied” some of the highlights of Jeff Jarvis‘ launch of Public Parts at Third Tuesday Toronto #3TYYZ.
The feed starts only about half way through the event (drats!) I’m not sure whether this is because I waited too long to create the Storify or whether it is because Storify limits the number of returns for any search. But regardless, it’s all good stuff and well worth a look.
Thank you Jeff for having come to both Ottawa and Toronto to share your insights with us. And thank you to Third Tuesday’s sponsors. You make it possible for us to bring speakers of Jeff’s calibre to Third Tuesday’s across Canada.
Where do PR agency leaders go to learn how to run their businesses?
If you run a PR agency, you know that it can be hard to find expert advice that relates directly to our business. There is no shortage of conferences and seminars dealing with practice issues – media relations, social media, research. But business skills that are tailored to the public relations industry. They are few and far between.
There is one conference that is unique in its focus and its attendees. The PRSA Counselors Academy Conference brings together owners and managers of public realtions agencies from across North America for two days of sessions focusing on the business of PR.
At the recent PRSA International Conference (a great conference for learning about communications best practices), my Inside PR co-hosts, Martin Waxman, Gini Dietrich and I caught up with Abbie Fink, the Chair of this past year’s Counselors Academy Conference. We talked with her about what makes Counselors Academy unique – and a must-attend for each of us.
At Counselors Academy, business leaders set aside their status as competitors in order to advance the collective whole, the public relations consulting industry. Abbie says the focus of the Counselors Academy Conference is “being a better owner, a better manager, discovering new ways to do business development and revenue streams … the management side of running a public relations practice.” How do they set billable hours? How do they determine when to bring on another employee? How do they deal with problematic clients? Under what circumstances would they fire a client?
Why do these PR business leaders share so freely with one another? According to Abbie, “If I can help another PR agency owner look at or do something in a different way and they become better at what they do, that’s good for our industry as a whole.”
You can hear our interview with Abbie and also Martin, Gini’s and my discussion of our own perceptions of Counselors Academy on Inside PR 275.
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If you are a PR agency principal and you go to only one conference this year…
The next Counselors Academy Conference will take place May 6 to 8, 2012 in New Orleans. And Inside PR’s Martin Waxman is co-chairing this year’s conference with Dana Hughens. You can be sure that I’ll be there along with the senior leaders of my company.
“If you are a PR business owner and you can only go to one professional development event,” says Abbie Fink, “then Counselors Academy is the one thing you should attend.”
If you’re interested in more information about this year’s conference, you can find it at the Counselors Academy Conference Website.
I’m going to be working with Martin Waxman!
Big news today. After collaborating for years as podcasters, bloggers and just good friends, Martin Waxman and I are going to be working together. Martin is going to be a Senior Counselor to Thornley Fallis and our clients. And, of course, his focus will be social media.
It turns out we’re both in Orlando today at the PRSA International Conference where we’re recording Inside PR podcast episodes with Gini Dietrich. So, as we were waiting for our next guest to arrive, Martin and I had a chance to talk about what we’re doing. We recorded a video of it to upload to our blogs because that’s the way we’re announcing it. On social media.
Martin also has posted about this move on MartinWaxman.com.
Martin has his first client meeting with us this Friday. Making a good week a great week.
Third Tuesday is back for Movember
Every year, men like me embarrass their wives, partners and friends during the month of November by failing to do something that they want us to do – shave. And why? Because simply by growing a moustache, we can remind people about a very important cause and raise money for it.
That’s the basic concept of Movember. Raising awareness and raising funds to fight prostate cancer.
Since it was founded in Australia five years ago, Movember has become a global movement. And Canadian men have been enthusiastic in embracing the opportunity to participate. The results are impressive. Movember Canada membership grew from 35,000 to nearly 199,000, and donations increased by 280%, to $23 million, good for #2 in the world.
It’s truly a case study of building an online community to do public good, across borders, across time zones, across oceans.
So, I’m really pleased that our October Third Tuesday Ottawa and Third Tuesday Toronto will feature leaders from the Movember movement. Peter Bombaci, the National Director of Movember Canada, , will speak to at Third Tuesday Ottawa #3TYOW on October 18 and Adam Garone, the CEO and co-founder of Movember, will speak at Third Tuesday Toronto #3TYYZ on October 19. They will talk about how Movember grew from its founding on the other side of the world in Australia to become a Canadian success story. How they used social media to spread the word and then to form an online community of mustachioed men who are prepared to look odd for a good cause.
As most people know, I lived through prostrate cancer myself – ten years and counting. So, I know from personal experience that this disease is not a death sentence. And more can be done to improve the prospects of men afflicted with this disease.
I hope that you’ll join us for this evening. It’s for a great cause. And to make it even more so, we will donate 100% of the admission proceeds to Movember. So come out to Third Tuesday Ottawa and Third Tuesday Toronto to hear about the Movember story. By attending you’ll be a contributor
Thank you to our sponsors
We’ve been fortunate to have great sponsors who have enabled us to bring top speakers not just to Toronto, but also to Third Tuesdays is Ottawa, Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver. Thanks to them, we’re back for our sixth season. Yes, that’s six years of smart discussion with thought leaders.
I want to thank the sponsors of Third Tuesday: CNW Group, Rogers Communications, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, Radian6 and Fairmont Hotels and Resorts. Thanks to these sponsors, we are able to program great speakers in cities across Canada, including Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver and Ottawa.
And a special thanks to our newest sponsor, Cision Canada. They not only helped to underwrite our costs, but they also lined up our speakers for this month.
Please join me in welcoming Cision as a sponsor to Third Tuesday. You’ll have a chance to do this in person, because Cision Canada’s new President, Terry Foster, will be attending both the Ottawa and Toronto events.
A professional development conference for media relations professionals
Is dealing with the news media part of your job? Are you looking for advice and best practices that will enable you to be more effective in your dealings with the media? Then you should may be interested in the Canadian Institute’s Advanced Media and Public Relations Summit in Toronto June 28-29.
I’ll be attending as well. On the second day of the conference, I’ll make a presentation about the tools and methods my company, Thornley Fallis, uses to monitor and manage our relations with both traditional media and new digital influences.
The agenda for the conference is available at the Canadian Institute Website. It’s a great opportunity to spend two days exploring the leading edge of media and public relations.
It happened again: This time a gold award from the CPRS
Last week I wrote about the excitement of watching the Thornley Fallis and 76design team’s creativity and hard work being recognized at the IABC Toronto Ovation Awards.
Well, it happened again. One of the programs we did with Allstate Canada – Driven to Distraction – won a Gold award at the Canadian Public Relations Society’s national awards ceremony. And our work with RBC on the “RBC Student Fall Banking Program Goes Digital” picked up a Bronze award.
Another great night. A night when we celebrate the talented team members who gave their very best to make our clients winners.
Thank you to all the Thornley Fallis team members for your great work. You make me proud to count myself one of you.
It’s HOW you play the game that matters
When Terry Fallis and I founded Thornley Fallis, we were two guys working on folding banquet tables in borrowed space. And we set out to create the kind of company that we’d really like to work at. A place that reflected our values.
Well, it’s 16 years later – and I just had one of those “back to the future” moments.
I was part of a team pitching a potential new client. We really wanted the business. But we also saw that there were problems with the way the potential client had spec-ed the Request for Proposal. So we proposed an approach that we thought was right for them. And it didn’t match 100% the things they had said they were looking for in the RFP. The senior officer at the table called us out on this and we had a good discussion about why we had proposed the approach we had. A really good discussion. At the end of it, he said our approach would make demands on his organization that he wasn’t sure they were ready for. He didn’t say that we weren’t going to be selected. But he did give us an honest response to our honest advice.
And then it happened. The other client representative in the room leaned forward and told us that he recalled reading our founding principles many years ago (when he worked for us; yes, it’s a small world.) He remembered that one of our founding principles was: “Give the client the advice they need, not the advice they want to hear.”
Whuff! One of those moments that remind you it’s about walking the talk. Doing what you say you want to do.
I’d love to win the account. I don’t know if we will. But I do know this: You have to really believe that it’s HOW you play the game that matters. Be true to your principles and have faith that you’ll get your fair share of wins in the long run.
Finally, a means of measuring the ROI of social media?
It’s about more than valuation
The big news this past week was the announcement that Salesforce.com would pay $323 million to acquire social media analytics company Radian6. The size of the valuation makes this an acquisition to watch. But what’s even more interesting is the potential it holds to trigger a great leap forward in the evolution of social media monitoring and analysis services.
A fork in the road
As a longtime user of social media monitoring services (Thornley Fallis currently uses Radian6, Sysomos and PostRank), I watched as the companies appeared to take divergent paths.
Sysomos has pushed its analytic tools (including a great keyword mapping tool), appealing to the data miners in our company. At the same time, it used its blog to highlight the insights that could be surfaced through its database.
PostRank has followed a similar path, but with the addition of some nifty APIs that enable other organizations to link directly to its database and build its algorithms into their applications. Both Sysomos and PostRank have placed emphasis is on the data, the database and the analysis. And in doing this, they have gained a loyal user base among social media professionals and analysts.
Radian6 seemed to follow a different path. The first indication of this was the introduction of its Engagement Console about 18 months ago. At that time, Radian6 seemed to shift its focus away from the core analytics tools toward providing tools to enable large organizations to manage their social media interactions.
In this way, I think Radian6 targeted the enterprise. And that brings them into Salesforce’s sweet spot.
Corporations like Dell have pointed to the challenge of scaling social media that stops many enterprises from using it effectively. Radian6 – and most other social media monitoring solutions have focused on providing community managers with tools to identify and manage the most important conversations in social media.
Until now.
Now, the Salesforce – Radian6 deal offers the promise of something truly different – an effective means of measuring the ROI of social media. Through the merger of Radian6 and Salesforce, I think they have the essential building blocks of an end to end service that will enable us to track our social media outreach and connect it to the sales funnel. If it is integrated this way, marketing and sales departments finally will be able to identify which social media activities lead to revenue – and to measure the return on their investment in social media activities. If Salesforce and Radian6 can pull this off, it may well yield a handsome return on the $1/3 billion investment Salesforce just paid for Radian6.
I’m cheering for them to make this work. If they do, a new standard in social media monitoring and measurement will be established and we’ll all benefit from it.
This is bound to be discussed at Social2011
I’ll have a chance to explore this when I participate in a panel on Friday at Social2011, Radian6′s user conference. I’ll be on panel titled “Can you define the ROI of social media?” with some people who know measurement – Katie Paine, Marshall Sponder and Ken Burbary. I’ll be sure to ask them what they think the implications are of the Salesforce-Radian6 deal. And you can be sure I’ll tweet the discussion. (Follow the hashtag #social2011.)
Gini Dietrich and Martin Waxman have views about this too?
Gini Dietrich, Martin Waxman and I talk about the Salesforce-Radian6 dealon Inside PR episode 248.
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