Kami Huse at Communication Overtones has a great blog post on why Twitter Is Making Us Lazy. She hits the nail on the head with this post while she reminds us that social media is just a tool. Great public relations is about creating a strong relationship with your stakeholders. It is about sharing ideas, thoughts, a vision and, in some cases, explaining why the people in an organization took or didn’t take a specific action. Tools like Twitter, Facebook, blogs and other social media networks or tools assist in the dissemination of information and are meant to help create a discussion. The key words there are “assist” and “help”—they don’t replace every other tool. Speaking with people is important. Telephone calls, meetings, conferences, town halls—all of it matters.
Video certainly paints a picture!
The NY Department of Health and Hygiene’s video campaign to wean the people of the big apple off soda has certainly generated a great deal of discussion in both traditional media and online.
Video Killed The Radio Star…
Who could resist that headline? I just read an interesting blog post on Mashable by Patrick Moran entitled: 5 Tips To Grow Your Business in 2010. Although Moran approaches it from a marketing perspective, this piece has great value for communicators as well.
The popularity of video is growing rapidly. In the past in Canada, video new releases (VNR) haven’t been widely used. That’s changing, I believe. In the United States, VNRs are used extensively. CNN even has a distribution service (CNN Newsource) where an organization pays to have its VNR distributed.
If Tiger called me for advice…
I think communicators follow scandals like the one that is dogging golf great Tiger Woods with a different mindset. Our focus is on what needs to be done to minimize the damage and what the person in the spotlight could do to save or rebuild their image or personal brand.
Tiger stays quiet
I have to admit, when I heard about the accident over U.S. Thanksgiving weekend involving Tiger Woods, I thought “hmmmm.” There seemed to be something missing from the story when I first heard it – what was Tiger doing leaving his house at 2:30 am on Thanksgiving, distracted enough to hit a fire hydrant and a tree?