Original Photo Credit: Keegan Jones

This week’s latest tweet debacle comes to us from CNN’s former Senior Editor of Mideast Affairs, Octavia Nasr. She was fired from CNN after tweeting “Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah… One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.” Unfortunately, since Mr. Fadlallah was considered a controversial figure with ties to the terrorist organization Hizbollah, CNN felt that her comments compromised her credibility as a reporter and let her go. Stirring up some serious political controversy is certainly one way to get yourself fired, but here are a few others to avoid for PR and marketing folks:

1. Tweet Confidential – Don’t tweet confidential information about your company, co-workers or clients. Leaking confidential information could lead to more than job loss, it could lead to law suits and SEC violations depending upon the severity of the leak.

2. Twitter Bashing – Whether you choose to sound off about a brand or a person, defamation suits are still applicable. If you think you’ll get free products or concessions from a company that’s wronged you, you might just get slapped with a hefty fine and damages.

3. Over-sharing – Don’t forget that tweets are public domain. Many employers can, and will, take action if you do something on your free time that could potentially damage their image or compromise their reputation. Even though it may be your own personal opinion or action, if you tweet about it, it’s hard for an organization to ignore.

4. Jumping the Gun – Is your PR firm pitching a new client? Is your company working on a new product? Are you planning to leave your job? If you leak information too soon, there may be repercussions. Sometimes in our exuberance, we blurt out the good news to a confidant in passing – but doing so on Twitter could have the news travel at digital speeds to your competitors or your company.

5. Whining About Work – Although there may not be a law restricting you from complaining about your 9-5, if you don’t want your employer to know what you are saying about them, think before you tweet. There are plenty of sites that allow you to vent anonymously, and of course, you can always call a trusted friend or your mom. But if you choose to document your frustration digitally, remember that Google never forgets, and either does your boss.

Have more suggestions on tweeting your way out of a job? Share them!

But the past few years have hardened me, my friends.  I guess you can say that I’ve developed an official love/hate relationship with social media.  So this post is a bit of a rant mixed with a little bit of love.

Why I Love Social Media:

• It allows me to be endlessly creative. Social media has allowed me to brainstorm and execute creative ideas for my clients regardless of their company size or budget.  Creativity is the reason why I work in this profession, and social media keeps me on my toes.
• I build incredible relationships for myself and my clients. I have met so many amazing contacts and resources on various social media platforms.  I love being able to share ideas with other like-minded individuals.  It’s so incredible to be able to brainstorm and have conversations in real-time, with people I may have never met in my offline life.  I’ve also helped my clients to locate their brand ambassadors, by finding and activating a community that they may not have even known existed.
• I demonstrate (and measure) its value for businesses.  By helping my clients to engage on social media, I’ve been able to demonstrate its power.  We’ve helped clients to manage the reputation of their brand, allowed them to provide enhanced services to their customers, and generate leads that drive sales.  I’ve also created measurement and tracking reports based on web analytics that measure and demonstrate the effect of social media efforts on my clients’ bottom line.
• It brings products to life. Social media breathes life into a product or service.  It gives businesses a distinct voice and the opportunity to put a face on their brand.
• It gives everyone a megaphone. No matter how big or small a company is – everyone now has the opportunity to succeed and be heard through social media.  The playing field has officially been leveled and the little guys can now go head to head with the big guys.

Why I Hate Social Media:

• Too many eggs are in the social media basket. Too many companies are putting 100% of their marketing efforts into social media.  What happens when Twitter pulls the plug? (and they might, we don’t pay – so they don’t owe us anything).  All of your efforts will be lost.  It’s so critical for companies to remember that traditional public relations and marketing always need a place in your communication strategy.  I also think that as communication professionals, we need to understand both traditional and new media – I see way too many recent college grads pigeon-holing themselves by becoming social media one-trick ponies.
• Some of us are getting lazy. I worry that some of us are capitalizing on the fact that not everyone understands how social media works.  If your clients don’t understand social media, teach them.  That’s why they are paying you for your services.
• Too many buzzwords, not enough action.  I’ve decided to create a social media drinking game.  Take a shot every time you hear the words “engagement,” “community,” “social graph,” and “micro-blogging.”  Yes, these are all important terms and it’s important to understand what they mean.  But the bottom line is that social media is about taking action.  Let’s cut out the buzzwords and create an actionable plan: find the right platform, find your audience, talk to them and talk with them, and then measure your results.  Optimize, measure and repeat.
• Let’s face it – we’re not all “gurus.” Social media is still young, and what I really love about it is the fact that the landscape is constantly evolving.  I don’t think any of us are really “gurus,” (although I do believe that there are people out there that truly rock at it).  Rather than gurus, let’s start calling ourselves social media advocates.  As social media advocates, we will work to help others to understand the value of social media.  We will work to learn more, listen harder and turn to each other when we need new ideas.

So, my fellow social media advocates – help me to build this list.  What do you love about social media?  What do you hate?  And if you’d like to brainstorm and learn together leave me a comment or follow me on Twitter @ksafrey.

An internship in any industry is vital to getting a foot in the door and a leg up on your competition with respect to obtaining a job. It helps determine if this field is the right one for the student or job-seeker, as well as provide the necessary introductory training for the intern to learn the basic skills of said profession.

In public relations, an internship is often the key to a successful career in the field as it encompasses most of the duties a person finds in an entry-level position, and not just administrative tasks. From learning how to use media-centric databases, performing client research, preparing clip reports, coordinating and working special events and helping with social media projects among other tasks, interns really get a taste of the many skills and communication methods that are required to become a solid PR practitioner.

Additionally, a public relations internship can help an applicant determine if he or she wants to work on the agency or in-house side of the industry. As my colleague Regina wrote in an earlier post, positions on either side can be very rewarding depending if you have the right skill set and personality to match the position. An internship is very useful in helping students and job-seekers navigate the waters of in-house and agency life and determine what side is the right fit for them.

Most importantly, public relations internships provide interns with skills that contribute to their overall professional success and not just within the industry. A few examples include:  learning the fine art of networking through helping with and staffing special events; becoming well versed in social media platforms, such as LinkedIn and Twitter, that can help their job prospects; and enhancing their written communication skills through press release, pitch and letter writing.

I know my media relations internship in college certainly paved the way for me to become a strong PR practitioner. Let me know how your internship helped you in the comments section below.

What have you learned so far during Social Media Week? Our next social media-themed blog post comes from Jonathan Mathias, senior account executive at Johnson King. Johnson King, our partner, is a European technology PR agency headquartered in London.

The Advancement of Twitter
By Jonathan Mathias

Since signing up to Twitter two years ago, I’m now following over 400 different accounts – something which recently led to an alarming crisis of confidence and a subsequent overhaul of how I use it.

It’s always been clear to me that Twitter would be a powerful tool, but given its ever-changing nature, the question of what you can do with it is much harder to answer. This makes it difficult to create a comprehensive Twitter strategy and has doubtlessly prevented many from investing the time needed to fully get to grips with it.

Any Google search will find you a million Twitter tips, most of which can be summed up in one sentence: “post regularly, with useful, relevant, interesting or personable content and always interact with your audience” – common sense, no?  Conversely, you’ll also find a multitude of blog entries debating why anyone would use it in the first place or whether there’s any real business value in using it (which rather misses the point – whether you like it or not, millions of people are using it to communicate every second of the day).

But, aside from what to do and why, with more and more businesses and their audiences clocking-on and signing up, how to manage Twitter has become far from straight forward.

At a very basic level, you can log on to the Twitter website, see what’s going on, search, post your updates, send private messages, etc..  Depending on how often the people you’re following post updates, this will probably work just fine up to about 100 people.  As you go past this figure – 200, 300, 400+ – it becomes very, very chaotic.

By logging into my account from the Twitter webpage at any one time, I’ll only see updates from the past five minutes or so.  If I want to see anything that happened before five minutes ago, I’ll have to go onto page two and beyond.  What about the vitally relevant tweet that was posted an hour ago?  In all likelihood, I’ve missed that chance.

Yes, you can search Twitter with relevant keywords in the hope of finding conversations you may have missed – but, if it’s anything, Twitter is immediate – and not very many people can afford to sit there on it all day doing that anyway.

A way to tackle this issue is to employ a Twitter client that specifically helps you to cope with large numbers of updates – like TweetDeck or Seesmic.

I’d dabbled with these in the past but until recently they seemed a little like overkill and over complicated – and, to the casual user, they are.  But, if you want to develop a worthwhile presence on Twitter, you’re going to want a manageable insight into what a lot of people are saying – something which is very difficult to do from the Twitter website alone.

I’ve just gone through a very long process to configure and learn how to interact with Twitter via a popular client.  This is not to say that applications are badly designed – they’re very necessarily complex, as they’re very powerful tools.

I’ve grouped the people I’m following into lists/columns (and handily added in LinkedIn and Facebook feeds), making it much easier to digest or catch-up on what’s going on at a glance.

Although most brands will have, at the very least, registered a Twitter account by now, many will be cautious users, content to wait and see just how big, useful and profitable it will be.  But some brands are already electing to use more advanced tools to manage Twitter.  And, given my experience, they are wise to do so.

Basically, to get the most out of Twitter, you need to be following a lot of people (and hopefully have a lot of followers) and you’re at an advantage if you use a client to manage the flow of information this generates.  Twitter’s user-base growth and the incorporation of it into day-to-day business seem to be pointing towards a future where Twitter could one day become a truly ubiquitous method of communication.

What’s certain is that Twitter has evolved massively in a short time, with new features and innovative ways of using it coming to light on a daily basis.  Will Twitter ever be a lean, mean, worthwhile business machine? Perhaps, but what’s sure is that if you want to be there when it does, you’ll need to put in some legwork now.

The distinguished panel included reporters and editors from all major Dow Jones properties:

• Peter Kafka, All Things Digital
• Julie Iannuzzi, The WSJ Digital Network
• Simon Constable, The News Hub
• Jon Friedman, Marketwatch
• Peter McKay, The Wall Street Journal

Each panelist gave some interesting insight into how they develop stories. Julie Iannuzzi explained that all publications under the Dow Jones umbrella are looking for a full package when reviewing a story idea. Including multimedia elements, specifically digital video, will help you immensely when pitching them a story idea.

When discussing how social media tools have impacted the media landscape, Jon Friedman made the insightful statement that social media is no longer just a tool, but a way of life. He went on to discuss how PR practitioners can effectively reach the media—his take: think like a journalist. Note to the wise, before pitching think about what the real story is and why the reporter should care.

Peter Kafka bluntly told the audience that his goals and his reader’s goals differ vastly from ours and those of our clients, so pitching him is generally an act in futility.

Although the panelists had differing views on how to reach them with story ideas, they all agreed that publicists should never call. They are always on deadline and you are just interrupting. So word to the wise, only call if you know the reporter well enough to justify your actions.

Another thing they could mostly agree on is that financial institutions have been slow to show up at the social media party. Peter McKay, who covers financials for The Wall Street Journal, is active on Twitter, but unfortunately many of his subjects are not. Peter asserted that this is likely a result of an abundance of caution and not strict adherence to any sort of FCC rules. True or not, it’s defiantly an interesting subject.

One more topic that sparked lively debate was the recent hoopla around the iPad. Does Apple’s slow leak of information and veil of secrecy around its products help or hurt? While the panelists were divided, most could agree that what goes up must come down—Apple will get their share of bad press eventually. As Jon Friedman so eloquently put it, the media loves to build people up and then tear them down, so Steve Jobs will get his—yikes!

Image Credit to TeachersPodcast.org

1. Follow folks who are going to be interested in what you have to say. (For the non-rock stars among us, there is a direct correlation between the number of people you follow and how many follow you.)
2. Say something interesting – have a point of view – provide great content – have an expected topic list. (Don’t go off about unrelated items or Seinfeld-like observations – provide value in every tweet.)
3. Interact with other folks – retweet (RT) good material, ask questions, thank people for following and RTing you. (According to @skydiver, a RT is the highest compliment on Twitter!)
4. Promote your Twitter handle – add it to your signature, your bio, website, Linkedin and other profiles, promote in newsletters etc.
5. List yourself in Directories – like Wefollow or Twellow – that allow you to tag yourself so that interested parties can find you.
6. Tweet live from events and use #hashtags. Folks at the event who are following it, will see your tweets and may follow you.
7. Join groups and participate in chats in your area of interest. For example, a PR person might join #journchat a scheduled conversation every Monday night between PR folks, journalists and bloggers.
8. Cross-pollinate – post your blog posts on Twitter, update your status on LinkedIn/Facebook (when relevant for that audience) through Twitter
9. Find your friends – use the Twitter tools to scan your contacts for Twitter users.

On a closing note, Twitter should be about quality, not quantity. If you have a few dozen followers that you are engaged and conversing with, that’s much more impressive than thousands of Twitter bots who’ll never help you succeed in life or business.

If you want to chat with me on Twitter, you can find me here – @sandrafathi.

Happy tweeting!

Can Twitter save lives? Danielle Modzelewski, assistant account executive at Affect, offers an interesting perspective on the usefulness of Twitter after attending last night’s Social Media Week event titled “Social Media and the Disaster in Haiti.” Read the full post on
the Johnson King blog!

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.

The last two columns, Web Traffic, and Lead Gen, require intelligence from your company. Web Traffic would require insight into analytics from the a company website which should be available from your web team. Lead Gen depends on your internal process for tracking sales sources if it’s part of the intake process. In addition, if there are events that require registration, such as a webinar or demo, the sourcing question can be added into the process.

This matrix is not exhaustive nor does it take into consideration the quality of engagement. This is just meant to be a simple tool to satisfy the numbers folks in your organization and to track performance across platforms over time.

• Have a voice and stay on message (themes)
• Be authentic, honest & ethical
• Get ready for a long-term commitment
• Provide value, not noise
• Aim for quality, not quantity
• Share & play nice in the social media sandbox
• Bring online relationships offline
• Measure, tweak, repeat

To learn more, read the full article here.