Category

Communications

Sep 15
Love0

Tweet, Meet, Eat and . . . History! Tweetup Friday, Sept. 16 at Noon

By Communications

A serious part of my Charlottesville cultural upbringing has been missing.

Confession: I have never been to The White Spot.

Upon learning this, my friend Coy Barefoot and I decided it was high time we meet for lunch and quickly turned our date into a full fledged tweetup, enhanced by a short, historical walking tour of The Corner at the University of Virginia.

Coy, an historian, wrote the book, The Corner: A History of Student Life at the University of Virginia.

Me? I just want a Gus Burger.

Join us! Friday, Sept. 16, 2011 at noon.

Eat, Meet, Tweet and History

Sep 14
Love0

Is Social Media Really Worth My Time?

By Communications, Social Media
Chester Hull

Chester Hull, Prosound

Chester Hull is a Caller Experience Expert at Prosound, and an intense proponent of helping companies provide outstanding experiences in all realms of customer interaction. He writes the Prosound Blog at www.prosoundusa.com/blog and you can connect by following Chester at facebook.com/chesterhull or twitter.com/chesterhull.

“How should I use social media to reach the right people?”

“How will I know if social media is ‘working’ for me?”

“I’m too busy to be a social media expert.”

I hear these a lot, especially from business people. It seems that so many businesses hesitate jumping in to the social media pool because they are afraid they will ‘fail’ or somehow not do it right (whatever those things mean!).

Return on Investment?

But rather than only measuring the return on your investment in time dedicated to social media for your business, here’s a another way to consider the value of social media. Especially if you are a business serving other businesses.

Provide Value

We follow all our clients on whatever social media platform they use. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. And we use that to help us provide extra value to our clients. For example: Today I noticed that one of our clients, the Charlottesville Albemarle Airport was conducting it’s Live Fire Training and Triennial Disaster Drill. I emailed the Deputy Executive Director and Director of Marketing to ask if we could help by providing an overhead announcement message that would educate passengers and visitors of the training. This would provide interest and information, as well as keeping people from panicking when they saw 200 participants from all the local emergency service agencies converging on the south end of the airport! The need to create an realistic environment includes the use of role players, real equipment, and actual emergency techniques. That could get pretty intense! And for those who would be unaware, could provide a storm of questions that the airport staff would have to answer from worried passengers! A regular announcement throughout the day would go a long ways to informing and calming passengers’ concerns.

Sale! Sale! Sale!

We’ve had similar opportunities as clients promote sales, events, promotions, or new releases. Believe me, your clients don’t always remember to share the details with you directly. But you can use social media to help keep you in the loop!

Relevant Help

Following clients allows businesses to be proactive about reaching out to clients that may be overwhelmed by all the planning and execution of an event or promotion! Instead of waiting (and hoping!) they remember to ask for your help, you will be able to offer relevant, timely help right when they may need it most. Securing your place as not just a service provider, but a true business partner…a company they can depend on to help them deliver outstanding service!

Value depends on what you measure

If you only think of social media as you speaking to your audience, you will be missing out on the value of listening to your clients and prospects. Social media isn’t just about what return you can get out of it. It’s also about finding out what you can do to add value to your clients, make their lives easier, or help them in some way.. Done well, and done right, they’ll thank you for it!

 

 

Sep 09
Love0

WTF? Friday: Four Ways Facebook and LinkedIn are Different

By Communications
[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/TimFree/status/112157907902136322″]

My friend Tim fired off a cranky tweet this morning — and I agree with it wholeheartedly. Four ways Facebook and LinkedIn are different:

  1. LinkedIn is specifically for business relationships; for the most part, your friends on Facebook aren’t there to do business.
  2. A person’s LinkedIn profile is their resume. A person’s Facebook profile often tells you far less about the person professionally, and more about them personally.
  3. We connect to people on LinkedIn to improve our careers, to endorse others with whom we do business and to seek new opportunities. We connect with people on Facebook to find out if that guy we went to high school with is still hot. (Pro tip: he’s not.)
  4. Facebook calls connections “friends” which is amusing and mislabeled. I’m not really friends with most of the people I’ve “friended” on Facebook. LinkedIn connections, however, should be held to a higher standard; it will happen you will be the link between person A and person B and if person A asks you for a reference regarding person B, you don’t want to say, “I don’t really know them.”

So don’t go accepting all those offers to connect on LinkedIn willy-nilly, you dope. Make sure they’re people with whom you actually have a relationship you can reference.

 

Sep 09
Love0

How the HIV/AIDS Conversation has Changed

By Communications, Media, Social Media

My friends Shawn and Gwenn began a joint career in 2000, educating teens and young adults about HIV and sexual health (Shawn is HIV positive; Gwenn is not). We met for coffee this week and talked about how the sexual health conversation has changed.

I learned that:

  • AIDS and HIV has become much less interesting to college campuses and other likely audiences; since AIDS patients manage the virus with a series of pharmaceuticals, the reputation of the virus has changed from that of a killer, to a “managed condition.” This is a false sense of security as people with AIDS are still at much higher risk of dying from a broad array of related causes, and is dangerous since it can lead to unsafe practices and spread of the virus.
  • Audiences (and the schools that fund them) are more interested in a broader sexual health conversation than focusing on HIV/AIDS. This opens potential new opportunities for the couple, particularly with the introduction of Gardasil, the HPV vaccine from Merck.
  • Sometimes, Shawn and Gwenn’s message isn’t welcome. Sometimes, there are pockets of denial; “our students aren’t having sex!” or groups that think that they’ve had all the sexual health education they need. That’s not really new, but has a resurgence when the country shifts to the right and has a stronghold in certain geographic areas. (No one has sex in the Bible belt, right?)

I’m interested, of course, in how students who are digital natives are learning; my guess is after friends, YouTube is a top educator. I’m not sure, as a parent, that I want my kids’ sexual health education to come from un-vetted sources (although I’m aware that has been the trend since sex itself became popular).

Shawn, also an author (My Pet Virus), has adopted social media outreach since before we even had definitions for it; a blogger back when blogging was “live journaling,” Shawn has successfully reached MANY living with AIDS or young couples with HIV positive diagnoses in their relationships. Adopters, too, of Facebook and Twitter, the couple makes their message available in all the channels where they can be found for those who may be searching.

There’s no substitute, however, for the message being delivered in person. A sponsor to make it possible for the couple to appear before more students nationwide would help extend safe sexual practices and hopefully, prevent the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, improving the futures of a generation.

What other ways have you heard the conversation change about AIDS, HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases? As a parent, how will your kids get the sexual health information they need? As an adult, where did your education come from? Was it correct, or sufficient?


Sep 07
Love0

Communicating 9/11: How We Talk and Write About it Does Make A Difference

By Communications, Crisis Communications, Media, Public Relations

In 2007, I shared my very personal 9/11 story. That was also the year I was devastated to learn our daughter didn’t — wouldn’t believe that the events of that date actually happened.  She didn’t remember — was just young enough then, that her absorption of it was at a minimum. In 2008 we took her to the site, to ground zero and finally, it really sunk in.

9/11 was real.

As we approach the 10th anniversary of the acts of terrorism, the Associated Press has provided us with guidelines to use when referring to, speaking about or publishing about 9/11.

  • Flight 93: Acceptable in first reference for United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed near Shanksville, Pa. Include airline name and context of crash in subsequent references. Flight 93 memorial is acceptable in all references for the Flight 93 National Memorial at the crash site.
  • ground zero: Acceptable term for the World Trade Center site.
  • The Sept. 11 attacks killed nearly 3,000 people: 2,753 in New York. Includes three later deaths from respiratory disease that have since been linked to illnesses caused by the towers’ collapse. 40 in Pennsylvania. 184 at the Pentagon. Total: 2,977 as of July 25, 2011. 2,983 names will be listed on the Sept. 11 memorial, including six who died in the 1993 World Trade Center truck bombing.

It’s important to remember, to be consistent in our storytelling and shared memories, to preserve and maintain the language with which we speak about the tragedies of that day, so generations later, history will not be rewritten.