While this lapse in judgment can negatively affect your pitching, whatever you do, don’t let it seep into your personal communications. When you find yourself talking in sound bytes to your mom, your dog — or, even worse, a prospective employer — tossing off great theses as though they are capable of standing alone can be a real buzzkill.

Case in point: let’s say I’m interviewing you. (This could happen! Email me!) You say, “Yeah, I don’t read blogs.” Full stop. Now, I’m willing to go there with you. That’s provocative! Why don’t you read blogs? Are you talking about all blogs, or just certain ones? What is it about blogs that perturbs you? Is this a new development in your life? Was there a time where you simply couldn’t get enough blog, and then, one day, shazam, the world of blogs lost its appeal?

You might believe that someone interviewing for a PR position should be immediately disqualified for lack of blogthusiasm. But  I can think of a bazillion ways to follow up this thesis statement with a compelling counterargument. Here’s one: when I can follow all of my favorite bloggers and publications via Twitter, who needs RSS feeds anymore? (Come on, that was easy.)

So, that’s my quick tip for you. Want to be taken more seriously, by me, your client, and journalists everywhere? Feel free to grab my attention with an outrageous thesis statement. But if you don’t follow it up with an actual argument, you’ve lost my interest — and my respect.

The idea of ideas has been on my mind a lot lately. All agencies are faced with idea generation on a daily, if not minute-by-minute, basis. From pitching journalists, to coming up with relevant tweets, to creating “big ideas” for marketing and PR campaigns, to writing proposals from scratch, everyone on our team pulls rabbits out of hats daily.

Yesterday, we were asked to revise a proposal for an existing client and instead came up with three new concepts that hadn’t even crossed our mind previously. Good ones! We felt smug, if a bit confused as to where the inspiration came from. “If we met tomorrow, we’d probably come up with three more,” I noted. And I really meant it.

Agency folks are a self-selected group of people who really like coming up with ideas. And that’s why I’ve always been unafraid to share our dreams, schemes, half- and whole-baked concepts with clients. Yes, this occasionally means that your brilliant program will be executed in-house, and that stings. But if you are confident in your ability to find something new around the next corner, you aren’t too concerned.

But what happens when the seemingly perpetual faucet of ideas runs dry? Not only do you lose your ideas source — bad enough — but, if you buy into the whole framework above, it can even put your agency in danger. Maybe you should start hoarding your ideas? Maybe you should start calling down the media list instead of tailoring individual pitches to each reporter? Maybe you should just do a “find and replace” in the proposal instead of finding specific examples relevant to the prospect?

As someone who prides myself on being one of these idea people, I have lately felt as though I am turning to the same old sources for material and having the same old thoughts around them. Even my recent Twitter refresh didn’t seem to help. I joked to the team that, instead of reading up on the news or finding inspiration online, sometimes I feel like I’m just pressing buttons to get pellets. Refresh. Refresh. And then I remembered this New York Times article from last year that is still seared into my brain:

Reporting earlier this summer in the journal Science, Nuno Sousa of the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute at the University of Minho in Portugal and his colleagues described experiments in which chronically stressed rats lost their elastic rat cunning and instead fell back on familiar routines and rote responses, like compulsively pressing a bar for food pellets they had no intention of eating.

From Seth’s blog post:

Do you often find ideas that change everything in a windowless conference room, with bottled water on the side table and a circle of critics and skeptics wearing suits looking at you as the clock ticks down to the 60 minutes allocated for this meeting?

If not, then why do you keep looking for them there?

From Geeta’s:

Travel. Traveling opens up your brain. If you live in NYC all the time, and you don’t leave, you’re running head to head with the most competitive group of journalists in the most competitive market on the planet. The media business is centered there; it’s the belly of the beast. It’s likely that a lot of you are coming up with the same pitches, and pitching them to the same editors. This makes everything harder for everyone.

If you feel like you are losing your elastic rat cunning and are falling into the press-button-get-pellets trap, you’re not alone. To the above advice, I would add:

• Surround yourself with awesome people. Create a work environment where everyone is expected to — and genuinely enjoys — creative thinking.  You don’t want to be The Idea Guy at your office. What happens if you’re having a bad day? I know that if I’m feeling a little off, I can turn to anyone on my team for a burst of inspiration.
• Admit defeat. When you’re done, you’re done. Go home. Take a day off. If there’s anything worse than feeling like a pellet-seeking rat, it’s working alongside a pellet-seeking rat.
• Know your work style. Sometimes I bow out of brainstorming sessions because I know that some of my best ideas happen when I let my fingers do the talking, i.e., just start typing.
• Be patient. With yourself. With your team. And with your expectations. Maybe you’re not procrastinating — maybe you’re just not ready yet. Don’t force it.

We agency folks on the PR and marketing side should make an effort to treat ourselves like the “creatives” we are. It’s easy to get caught up in client relations, account management, and executing on all of the ideas we’ve generated. But we can’t take our ideas, or the environment it takes to cultivate them, for granted.

Image above via the University of North Florida Animal Lab

It was my honor to present a guest lecture at Jay’s NYU SCPS class on Positioning & Brand Development. I like to think that the case study I presented on our recent Regus NYC campaign — which has been nominated for PRSA Big Apple and Sabre awards — demonstrated that philosophy. Though we deployed more than a kitchen sink’s worth of marketing tactics in order to generate leads for Regus’ 18 Manhattan locations, our first order of business was localizing the company’s brand message and positioning. By injecting a little humor into the campaign and calling in a few partners with local street cred, we doubled our lead gen goal and earned the right to continue working with the amazing marketing team at Regus.

If you are thinking of taking a continuing education class to fill in the gaps in your marketing knowledge, consider Jay’s Positioning & Brand Development course. You’ll be surrounded by fellow students who are professionals in their fields — from advertising sales, to investor relations, to Web entrepreneurs — and who are also actively pursuing training to advance their careers.

Photo credit: Melanie Warner, Hotiron Creative

Wish you were celebrating Social Media Week in London? Me too. We’re bridging the divide by bringing you fresh social media week-themed posts from our partner, Johnson King, a European technology PR agency headquartered in London. We plan to include coverage of Social Media Week events in London and other relevant thoughts.

Today’s installment comes from Tom Kirkham, account manager, who tells the story of his social media revelation (complete with Biblical references). Tom manages Johnson King’s Twitter handle, @johnsonkingpr, and posts frequently to the Johnson King blog.

Enjoy, and look for more updates from our friends in the UK later this week.

I also understand why the management teams of social networking sites want to expand their footprints. The economics of online communities are still mired in metrics like churn. Unable to capture the long-term attention of their core users, these sites constantly invent new carrots to dangle before prospective members to entice them into the circle. Oh, you like status updates, Mr. Twitter User? We have them, too!

Instead of rolling at our eyes of this cynical product development cycle, in which we don’t actually get new features but become a part of a pissing contest among these sites, we gobble them up. And then we — I’m talking to you, social media gurus — use the duplicate functionality to blast out the same status updates to those we are connected to on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. As my friends from South Africa say: Shame.

Have you looked at your LinkedIn RSS updates recently? What used to be a great source for monitoring your business contacts’ connections has become a crowded, noisy bar of sometimes-pithy inspirational messages, quotes, and even notes like “going to bed now.” Yes, this is partially LinkedIn’s fault. Every few weeks I fill out a trouble ticket requesting better RSS subscription options. So far, it’s still one big dumb light switch that turns them on or off.

But — paying attention, social media gurus? — any Web-savvy businessperson worth their retainer should know this fact and make the choice to adjust their social networking habits accordingly. Not only should you understand what makes each site unique, in terms of functionality, value, vibe, and community, you should also examine where your personal social networks overlap. Chances are, if I’m connected to you on LinkedIn, I’m probably following you on Twitter as well. That means if you’re Ping.fm’ing or hashtagging your tweets for cross-posting, I’m getting your status updates twice.

What’s more, your updates are polluting the stream of the actual valuable LinkedIn information I desire, diminishing the value I get out of being a part of that community. (The reverse would also be incredibly annoying: what if every time I connected with someone on LinkedIn, I sent the update to my Twitter stream? Even worse than Foursquare, right?)

So, instead of using bad functionality just because it exists, and just because you haven’t taken the time to evaluate what it means, check yourself. What is LinkedIn for? Business connections. What is Twitter for? Status updates. Yes, these venn diagrams overlap. The point is, proceed wisely. The status update shakeout is coming. Will you be unfriended?

Here’s another way of putting it. Peanut butter and jelly are both delicious. But if Smuckers’ ambitious plans for 2010 involved unseating Jif by breaking into the peanut butter market, wouldn’t you be a tad suspicious? You wouldn’t? Ah, well, there’s a word for someone like you.

As I watched the interview at home on Monday night, I realized I wasn’t emotionally invested in McGwire’s story. I’m a huge sports fan, it’s true. But I didn’t grow up with baseball and definitely was not paying attention to it during the “magical” season of 1998.

Instead, my first thought was: who are the puppet masters pulling the strings behind this elaborate PR maneuver? Who made the decision that the best way to reintroduce McGwire to the media — who have been anxiously anticipating a follow-up to his awkward 2005 Congressional testimony — was 60 minutes of no-holds-barred, live questioning by Bob Costas? I don’t have immediate sources to back up this claim, but my gut tells me that other athletes in McGwire’s situation have typically issued terse, written statements and laid low. Check this list and let me know if I’m mistaken.

Here are my PR takeaways from Monday night’s interview.

The Medium is the Message
The performative aspect of McGwire’s interview can’t be overstated. The sheer act of sitting in the chair, in makeup, under the lights, for the longest, most serious interview I’ve seen on TV in ages, inherently played in McGwire’s favor: it humanized him. After a few rounds of repetitive questioning, and repetitive answering, I found myself zoning out and just thinking, poor guy and don’t worry, it’ll be over soon. And even as the sports writers (who I’ll get to momentarily) chastised him for not being contrite enough, they did give him credit for “manning up” and volunteering to speak on the record. Again, that choice puts him in stark contrast to the dozens of other silent accused steroid users.

Sports Writers Have Serious Issues
There were shades of Oprah’s public shaming of James Frey in the way the MLB Network commentators responded to McGwire’s remarks. In this case, the “million little pieces” that shattered weren’t Oprah’s book club machine but the sports writers who made a living spinning yarns about the magical 1998 baseball season, in which McGwire and Sosa competed to overtake the home run record. Just as Oprah “made” James Frey by promoting his book in her club, Tom Verducci et. al. give the impression that they somehow “made” McGwire with such effusive media coverage. And, like Oprah, they somehow felt the need to publicly shame their former hero so the taint didn’t rub onto their sportscoats.

If you read the book A Million Little Pieces and enjoyed it, does knowing it might not be 100% true retroactively erase the pleasure you experienced reading it? If you were a baseball fan who loved every minute of the 1998 home run chase, does knowing Mark McGwire was one of many players who used performance enhancing drugs during that season spoil the fun you had then? Guess what? IT CAN’T. Unless you found a hole in the time-space continuum, the fun you had was the fun you had.

It shocks me that more people don’t see the underlying ninja PR-move at play, on the part of the journalists who somehow are able to make us believe that they are victims, and, in the case of McGwire, chastise him for not reading off of their pre-approved contrition script. (Though McGwire admitted to using steroids, he didn’t “admit” that they directly, positively affected his performance, i.e., his record breaking home run season.) Wow. As I said in my tweet, I never thought I’d agree with Harold Reynolds but was relieved when he gave Verducci and Rosenthal a reality check in his post-interview remarks.

Exclusives Can be Pulled Off
Apparently Bob Costas was approached as early as January 6th to conduct the interview, though he didn’t know when or where it would take place. And though the media had been anticipating a McGwire interview — Costas himself had been chasing him since February 2009 — it appears that, until his statement was published on the Cardinals website around 3pm Eastern on Monday, the story hadn’t leaked. Kudos to Bartow and his team, led by former Bush press secretary-turned-sports PR flack Ari Fleischer for pulling off that feat.

We All Deserve a Boss Like Tony LaRussa
He hired McGwire as the Cardinals’ new hitting coach knowing that in itself would cause a PR stir — whether McGwire decided to “come clean” or not. And not only did he stay out of the preparation for Monday’s events (“I had a heads-up it was coming, but I didn’t know what he was going to say,” La Russa said Tuesday), he took tons of interviews to stump for McGwire immediately afterward. Here’s one. That says a lot about LaRussa as a person, and a manager.

There are No Fairytale Endings
The one writer whose opinion I actively sought out on this topic was Will Leitch, former editor of Deadspin, current contributor to New York Magazine and, perhaps most importantly, die-hard Cardinals fan. Check out his recent McGwire post on NYMag.com’s The Sports Section, which concludes with this thought:

There will always be something wrong with any statement McGwire or the rest of them make. We’re mad because we feel duped. Who cares that PEDs weren’t banned by baseball when McGwire played? Who cares that he looks like a truly penitent, haunted man? He messed with America’s memories, and he can’t put a nice ending on it now. Sorry, Mark; sorry, Barry; sorry, Rocket: Your crime is not taking steroids, your crime is taking steroids too late in your careers to make up for it on the field before you retired.

He’s right. There is no antidote for “messing with America’s memories;” there was never going to be a perfect outcome to please all those invested in the story. But, in my opinion, the past week’s events have been a net positive for McGwire, the Cardinals, and their PR team — and a net negative for sports journalists who, unlike Leitch, can’t tell where their feelings end and McGwire’s contrition begins.

By the way, Oprah eventually apologized to Frey. Anyone ready to man up yet?

At the time, not all of the companies brought into the fold were also brought in to our existing marketing programs. But I can understand why, when Adobe acquired Omniture on September 15, Adobe would want to introduce itself to Omniture’s customers. I’m just not sure they went about it the right way.

I’m not an Omniture customer. I follow their news because staying abreast of analytics trends is relevant to my industry and to my clients. I’ve downloaded their whitepapers and have possibly attended a webinar in the past several years, but I’m not an Omniture client.

I received a joint Omniture/Adobe email this morning — more than a month after the acquisition — addressed “Dear Omniture Customer,” with the subject line, “Omniture is now an Adobe company.”

It made me laugh. Nope, not a customer. And this is old news. These days, I’m so attuned to stories breaking on Twitter, the thought of sending an email like this out even a few days post-acquisition would be a little beside the point.

But maybe I was being too hard. I examined the email further to determine if there was a more substantive rationale for sending it. Does the Adobe communications team want to whet my appetite with some exciting news, development road maps, or visions of what joining forces with Omniture will mean to me?

Eh…you decide:

By combining Adobe’s content creation tools and ubiquitous clients with Omniture’s Web analytics, measurement and optimization technologies, the company will be well positioned to deliver solutions that can transform the future of engaging experiences and e-commerce across all digital content, platforms and devices.

I read further and noticed that tucked away into the body of the email was this gem:

To best serve our customers, we may choose to integrate Omniture’s contact database, including your information, into Adobe’s database in the future.

Adobe/Omniture just sent me an email announcing that I was officially being opted in from Omniture’s database to Adobe’s database. But without using those words.

Why not just come out and say it? I’m not going to bite.

Clarity of message is such a key part of tech PR. Can we let the buzzwords die once and for all and just talk to people?

In summary: wrong target audience (from a company that should be experts at parsing lists). Incoherent, misleading message. Pointless email.

At the risk of blowing my cover, I often follow people as a way of determining, hmmm, would this person make a good Affect Strategies employee? Twitter helps me meet great, social media-savvy candidates who work in PR and related fields. I have hit it off with some very smart, capable, two-to-five-years-of-experience folks on Twitter. I find that these Gen Y (yes, I just said “Gen Y”) candidates are smart enough to understand that there is a performative aspect to their PR pro Twitter persona. They may not like me — who knows, they may not enjoy my tweets at all! — but they willingly engage in repartee with me. And that’s fun, and I hope it continues.

However, in the past month, I’ve had the opportunity to transition some of these digital acquaintanceships into Real Life. And while I’ve been unafraid to make the transition, those in my Twitter circle are not. A pattern is emerging, and here it is: these alleged “digital natives” may be savvy within the confines of the ones and zeroes, but don’t try taking them out of their online habitat.

The details have been scrubbed to protect the innocent, but so far it’s Twitter 3, Real Life 0:

Tweep 1: Prospective new hire. Engaging with me constantly on Twitter in order to gain an interview. DMs and RTs galore. After garnering the interview? Silence. I’m not even sure they’re following me anymore.

Tweep 2: Savvy social media/PR person. Have interacted on Twitter. Introduce myself at an event with the phrase, “I follow you on Twitter!” They cringe, turn around, and leave me standing mid-handshake.

Tweep 3: Very smart, very funny young tech PR pro. I would consider this person for a job at our agency in a heartbeat. Have twice suggested we meet for drinks — in my mind, a less intimidating interview option. Both DMs ignored.

I should point out that I have had lots of success taking Twitter-initiated relationships with more professionally mature people offline. That only supports my thesis, which I’ll restate here: Gen Y-ers have trouble integrating their on- and off-line work personae. Set your expectations about what they will contribute to the real world wisely, because, in their minds, what happens on Twitter…stays on Twitter.

• Absolute Software’s CEO, John Livingston, appeared on Fox Business‘ “Small Business, Big Ideas” segment. Check out the full video on Absolute’s blog. (And why not follow Absolute on Twitter, too?)
• Proclivity Systems was named to BusinessWeek’s 50 Startups You Need to Know list.
• We welcomed Chrissy Carney, Account Supervisor, and Kaylen McNamara, Assistant Account Executive (and former Affect intern) to our team. By the way, Chrissy is looking for a new apartment in Manhattan. Send us your leads!
• Sandra rounded out her whirlwind spring speaking tour at yesterday’s Vocus Virtual Conference.
• We said farewell to our office mates, Fashion Snoops, who recently moved across the street. You may not recognize the place on your next visit! And if you have trouble finding me, that’s because I’m now sitting in an office.
• Finally, we took on quite a bit of new business. Details coming soon

How’s your summer going? Hope you are having as much fun as we are.

• How has social media changed the way we recruit online, collect data and conduct surveys?
• What are some techniques for pulling customer insights out of the blogosphere?
• Is social media right for some clients but not others?

The best part? Registration is free! Sign up on the Brainloaf website to join us.

Social Media is Everywhere, but How Does it Affect Market Research?

Session 1: 9 am – 10:30 am
Session 2: 12 pm – 1:30 pm

Advanced Focus

373 Park Avenue South

8th Floor
New York, NY 10016
212.684.2000

Hope to see you there!