It happened again: This time a gold award from the CPRS

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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

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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?

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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.

Join a live recording of Inside PR at Podcamp Toronto 2011

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If you’re in Toronto next Saturday, February 26, we’d love it if you could join us at Podcamp Toronto 2011 for a live production of Inside PR. We’ll be recording during the first session after lunch. And Terry Fallis and David Jones, the original hosts of Inside PR, will be joining us for this special session. So, do come out and be part of a live recording of Inside PR.

Controversial Clients: Too hot to handle?

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If you take on controversial clients, you’d better be sure that the people in your company are onside. If you fail to do this, disaster lies ahead.

That’s where Eric Portelance, Sean Howard and I come down in this week’s Social Mediators. We revisit the question of how consulting organizations should decide whether to take on a potentially controversial client.

Sean believes that the decision about a controversial client can be a defining moment for a company. Indeed, the decision will affect both the external perception and the internal self-image of the company.

Eric argues that companies need to first determine whether their employees will want to work for the potentially controversial client. People should not be compelled to work on issues that conflict with their personal beliefs.

I suggest that this is one of those issues on which senior executives should be mindful that their own preferences must be balanced by staff preferences. Eric asks, Will the new client be consistent with the image of the company that employees themselves have.

How will existing clients view the new relationship? Every company must be sensitive to how existing clients react. Do clients hire us to accomplish a specific mandate or do they have a claim on other parts of our professional lives?

Our bottom line: In the era of the social web, when we all need to be authentic, it’s just not viable to say, let’s take all clients. It won’t pass the social sniff test. People will see you as a gun for hire, open to the highest bidder. And that’s not the way any of us would want to be seen.

As Sean Howard says: “Your decision shouldn’t be made out of fear. It should be made out of conviction.”

Would you, should you, take that client?

Three things every PR practitioner should know to succeed in social media

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If you were asked to give public relations practitioners the three best pieces of advice about how to succeed in social media, what would you tell them?

I’ve been asked to do that at a PR Agency Bootcamp organized by the Canadian Council of Public Relations Firms. I’ll be appearing with some social media-savvy panellists: Martin Waxman, Mark Evans, Michael O’Connor Clarke and Alex de Bold. So I’ll need to be on my best game in order to keep up with these folks.

As I thought through all the advice I could offer about being successful in social media, I settled on these three pieces of advice.

1)  Be a blogger.

If you don’t stand out from the crowd, you won’t have a stand-out career. You no longer are competing just with the person across town, but with people across the continent and the globe. The age of social media has made it possible for really smart and creative people to project their voice and their identity online – beyond their own local market right into yours. If you don’t raise your voice, they’ll scoop the best jobs and assignments right out from under your nose. Where will that leave you? Probably competing on cost for low value assignments and routine jobs. Competing on cost leads in only one direction – razor thin margins, working longer and longer hours, and burnout.

So, you need to stand out. And stand out in a way that will impress others who may be looking for smart, talented people.

“But,” you say, “I’m on Twitter and Facebook and I have thousands of followers and friends. That makes me stand out.” Well, maybe it makes you stand out as a well connected person and a person who likes to be part of the flow of chatter. But it does not make you stand out as a smart, thoughtful person.

Look around and you’ll realize that virtually all of the people in PR with large followings on Twitter and Facebook also have blogs in which they frequently post content into which they’ve put a lot of thought. Look at people like Steve Rubel, Mitch Joel, Shel Holtz, John Bell, Jay Baer, and Gini Dietrich. Yes, they have thousands of followers on Twitter. But they seed the conversation with intelligent, long form blog posts. That’s thought leadership. And it’s different from being a gadfly on Twitter or Facebook.

Don’t lurk in the shadows. People respect and follow those who have something original to say. There’s no excuse today for being unknown. You a unique perspective on the world. Share it.

And when you do share your perspective, put that perspective on your own place where you can develop your ideas over time. Where people can see your body of thought. Blogs are still the best place for that. You own your blog. It’s searchable. It is a platform for every type of content: text, audio, pictures and video. It’s linkable. If you have something worthwhile to say, why wouldn’t you put it on a blog?

Stand out from the crowd. Be a blogger.

2) Become the new beat.

We are in a constant search for expert opinion. Research is a neverending activity for people who need to write about a subject. So contribute to the body of knowledge.

Don’t think about yourself as someone who’s going to pitch stories to reporters. Think of yourself as a contributing member of a community of interest. Research and write as if you were a beat reporter.

Pick areas that you care about and structure your public relations practice around becoming a member of the expert community. Write about your area of expertise. Share what you know. Become recognized as someone who knows your stuff and contributes real value on an ongoing basis.

As you do this, you’ll find that you attract a following of other people who share your interest. Many of them will have blogs of their own. Some will even be reporters. And as they follow you, you’ll build credibility and trust. When you do talk about a client, you’ll be able to do this (with full disclosure, of course) to a group of people who already care about the subject area. They’ll know you and they’ll listen to you.

This is the future of public relations. Isn’t that better than building your workday around a series of cold call pitches to reporters who are little more than names on a media list?

3) Develop your own sources

There’s been a lot of talk from some people about how they stopped subscribing to RSS feeds or using their feed readers because they now get pointers to the content that matters to them through the people they follow on twitter or via Facebook status updates.

If you’re a serious professional trying to develop a reputation for expertise in an area, you absolutely need to recognize that getting your links through twitter or Facebook links means that others are making the primary judgments about what content you see and framing it in their perspective. That’s lazy and it’s also biases your own thinking. You should make up your own mind about what’s important and approach content from your own unique perspective.

I may see one thing in an article. You may see something totally different. Why? Because we are approaching that content from our own unique perspectives. So if you want to be taken seriously and if you want to be able to generate interesting, original writing, start looking at your feed reader again. Start finding and subscribing to interesting and authoritative voices and read those every day with a fresh eye to what may be in that content. That primary research will give you an advantage over everyone who is dependent upon what others may link to.

Your turn

So there it is. Three things that I would tell a PR practitioner about how to succeed in social media.

Do these make sense to you? Are there other things that you would put ahead of any of my points? Or do you think I’m just plain wrong? Let me know in a comment below this post. I’m always interested in learning from those who are prepared to consider and challenge my ideas. (Maybe that should be a separate piece of advice: Always keep an open mind.)

Content Rules in Calgary: The Taxi Interview

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If this is Thursday morning, it must be Calgary. And we must be on our way to Vancouver.

C.C. Chapman has how done three of his four Third Tuesday Content Rules events – in Montreal, Toronto and Calgary. One more to come tonight in Vancouver.

In the taxi on our way to the Calgary Airport for our flight to Vancouver, C.C. talked with me about his impressions of Canada and the people he’s been meeting.

Nice words about Canada by one heck of a nice guy.

Inside PR: Do you provide references?

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In this week’s episode of Inside PR, Gini Dietrich, Martin Waxman and I discuss how we, as employers, tackle the challenge of providing references for former employees.

It seems to me that this is one of those areas in which legal liability forces us into a situation in which we are constrained in what we can do. That leads to conflicting impulses and emotions. We want to do the right thing. But are we allowed to?

Listen to this week’s episode to hear Martin, Gini and I discuss how we try to deal with this struggle. None of us claims to have the right answer, but we all think it’s something that we must come to grips with.

Inside PR 2.37 - Would you give me a reference? Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Would you?

If you are an employer, do you provide references for past employees? If you do, what practices and standards do you apply to ensure that you are fair and consistent? When you are hiring, do you rely on references?

If you are an employee, do you expect your employee to provide a reference for you?

Content Rules in Montreal

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C.C. Chapman started his Third Tuesday Content Rules tour in Montreal last night. And it was a great start to what looks like it’s going to be a fantastic week of discussion about how to create content that breaks through the clutter.

C.C. really gave generously of what he knew. He was on his feet for almost 90 minutes. To the end, people were asking questions and keeping the discussion going. It was a great night.

Christian Aubry captured the whole presentation on video. So, if you want to get a taste of C.C.’s presentation or even watch the whole thing (just don’t let your boss catch you watching a 90 minute presentation at work), you can. Just click below to watch it. (If you don’t speak French, fast forward to 2 minutes 51 seconds. From there on, it’s all in English.)

Thanks to Christian Aubry for recording this video, to Mitch Joel for introducing C.C., to Michelle Sullivan and her entire third Tuesday team, to our local sponsors, energiPR, HKDP, Thornley Fallis. You made last night possible. And thanks to our national sponsors, CNW Group, Rogers Communications, Radian6, and Fairmont Hotels and Resorts. because of you, we are able to bring great speakers to communities across Canada. Thanks to you we all get to share in the discussion.