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The Bulldog Reporter’s Media Relations Summit was held last week in San Francisco. Nice venue, absolutely gorgeous city, yet an unfortunately poor trade show floor layout. Some excellent speakers though, my particular favorite being Duncan Wardle, from the Global PR team at Disney.

Hearing Disney acknowledge they no longer have full control over their messaging was great. So what are they doing about it? They are embracing user-generated media. One example, they ran a hugely successful recruitment campaign called ‘Win the Disney Dream Job’ on You-Tube (watch the winning video here). Generated thousands of hits and encouraged interaction amongst their market. Very cool.

What else? The working population have become impatient with the media as a result of the real-time nature of the internet. Instead, we’re ‘media snacking’ - checking a site at lunch, reading our RSS feeds on the B’berry on the bus home. Apparently 55 percent of people get their news online now.

His point? PR professionals need to realize this fundamental shift in how consumers are being increasingly selective on the news they read (and what they want to receive) and have an ever increasing ability to block unsolicited information OUT. If you’re going to reach your audience, mainstream outlets are no longer enough. All media sites will go big with video.

You can get two great summaries of Duncan’s presentation here and here, including some of the great videos he used.

In the meantime, here are some hilarious photos from our trade show booth (note Ibrey Woodall from TekGroup rocking out with the guitar)!! The lucky winner of the ‘Rock your brand. Become the corporate hero’ competition (PlayStation 3 and Rock Band Video Game) was Kristi Ernsting from Hallmark Cards. Congrats!

I imagine that Target’s PR and Corporate Communications group are, as we speak, planning a coming out party to address their actions moving forward.

For those of you hiding under a rock, Target has been the target of a torrential blogosphere downpour because of their email response to Amy Jussell (Shaping Youth) who had emailed criticizing a billboard ad. To quote their official response: “Target doesn’t deal with non-traditional media”.

Uh oh. Worldwide bloggers’, branders and communications feathers have been ruffled.

Why don’t they monitor CGM? They have limited resources. But then, so does everyone. Considering the New York Times are now all over this story, they are undoubtedly questioning their ‘old media’-focused strategy.

For us here at dna13, we sympathize with big brands like Target, who get stuck in these circumstances.

What have we learned working with our customers in these crisis situations:

1. Everyone should be monitoring blogs. Full stop. period. Mack Collier, a social media/marketing/blog expert summed it up well. It is “unforgivable for a major corporation, in 2008, to have a policy in place that states that it ignores bloggers.” This doesn’t mean a dedicated resource, all day, every day, reading and scanning all the blog alerts that come in. There is a better way. Software could have been working while they slept, bringing in keyword-specific alerts, identifying trends, highlighting those that need to be addressed - all via one login. This would save time, money and a company’s reputation.
2. Everyone should be sharing the monitoring load. Generating so much coverage definitely puts a strain on what resources you have -especially if you want to analyze and learn from it quickly. If companies used a collaborative monitoring tool that could open up the monitoring, scoring and reporting function to multiple team members, they could gain much quicker insight into the tonality of what was being said, what the pickup was looking like, etc.
3. Everyone should have a digital/social media strategy. Target are a step ahead on this front. They are active on Facebook with over 18,000 group members. They have recognized the power of this social media, as should everybody else. Thanks to Gavin Heaton’s post for this tip.
4. Everyone should come out with a crisis response. Having not had immediate insight into Jussel’s blog post and the 96+ comments it generated ALONE, meant the story propelled to an uncontrollable level rapidly. Perhaps the New York Times may have stayed out of the way too.
5. Everyone should be monitoring blogs. Have I mentioned that?
6. Everyone should be putting brand equity and investors first. Having not been concerned enough about the influence a blogger can have, has undeniably put Target’s brand value at risk. According to MSN’s Money Central, the TGT stock took quite a beating between July and December last year. Ouch. Their value started to gain early this month… but..now we’re concerned. What impact is this going to have on their share value now?

Google announced on Thursday their latest tool - “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. The goal, according to a post by Google’s VP Engineering, is to help people share their knowledge with others, and be accountable for it, citing that the currents method to do so “(are) not easy enough to do”…. I guess Wikipedia’s glaring ‘Edit this page’ tab is not as easy to navigate as it appears?

The blog space has been flooded with criticism and support of Google’s latest move, but mostly in regards to its copy of Squidoo’s 2005 model and perceived attempt to ‘kill’ Wikipedia.

Does it have potential? According to some, if it means an accurate and reliable source, then yes. The value in a single, strong and authoritative voice far exceeds the largely unqualified views of strangers who haven’t put their reputation on the line when making a Wikipedia statement. The number of comments to about the downside of WP’s collaborative stance (i.e.’WP is a ‘well-known cesspool of undocumented sources, opinion passing as fact and misinformation’), seem to indicate that the reliability of WK has become questionable.

The concerns for me stands with who decides upon the authority (and author) of a subject? For the time period that it remains invite only, then who’s to stop it from skewed individuals write on topics and consequently pushing their competitors perspectives out of the picture?

Fortunately Google think they have a work around. People will be able to submit comments, propose additional content and edits. Plus, people have the ability to rate the knol and write a review of it.

For knowledge sharing and collaborative tools, it looks like there is another player in the field. Though, whether it is a serious contender or not - I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

I was just surfing and came across a post made earlier in the year by Rob Stokes from Quirk eMarketing. Of particular interest to me was his the 6th guideline on dealing with an online attack.

He suggests that marketers and comms teams should employ some SEO techniques to counteract the search engine portion of the online attack. I’m no expert in SEO, but he makes it sound so simple.

You should work to keep the negative search term results (associated with your brand) out of search engines with the following steps:

1. Determine the search terms that are giving the dreaded page(s) such high ranking.
2. Work to ensure your own website ranks higher on those terms to push your ranking higher and displace the negatives ones.
3. Work to own the rest of the other search results on that page (10 in total) with additional content you don’t necessarily own - such as articles that you authored and published online, content from news feeds that you’ve commented on, social media pages such as Squidoo and MySpace or blog forum posts tagged with all the terms you’re trying to own.

Richard Binhammer, Director of Corporate Comms at Dell will be coming to our capital city next week to share his experience with adopting social medium techniques in order to manage Dell’s reputation during their recent, yet not so quiet, crises.

Local social media thought leader, Joseph Thornley, has arranged for Richard to fit us into his busy speaking schedule with an appearance at the Third Tuesday session in Ottawa. Fortunately for us, this relaxed restaurant environment will allow for us to have a real fireside chat with him.

I am particularly interested in hearing from him about the coordination and management behind Dell’s quick response to the blogger and YouTube attacks. Companies of this size are usually plagued with bureaucracy and a lack of coordination when it comes to delivering a synchronized response, yet it appears that Dell avoided this.

Binhammer also spearheaded their blogger outreach and social media campaigns. Between the launch of Direct to Dell, a blog where Dell employees talk directly about the products and respond to other postings and Dell IdeaStorm, a customer suggestion and commentary blog, Binhammer has managed Dell’s reputation with a proactive web 2.0 strategy that is admirable.

The gatherings are planned for December 3 in Ottawa and December 4 in Toronto, though attendees need to register ASAP as the locations are quite small. He’s also speaking at a combined IABC/CPRS event, for which you can register here.

As a native to Canada, I hope he remembers to bring his snow jacket!

We’re off to the PRSA International Conference tomorrow in Philadelphia to mix with loads of important people from the PR industry. It has a reputation for being the Superbowl of all shows, so we’re pretty pumped.

For those of you attending, make sure you stop by booth #200. Not only will we have a huge contingent of dna13 staff on site to walk you through a demo, but we will be giving a sneak peak into our upcoming January ‘08 release which is all about enhanced measurement and analytical capabilities for campaign and issue reporting.

We’re also going to be giving away three iPhones throughout the course of the conference - just come by and pick up a ballot form.

Gartner has just come out with some scary news for big business. Manage your online reputation or beware. An industry colleague, who was lucky to get their hands on the research, blogged on some of its findings”

“Garter has predicted that by the end of 2010, threats to damage a corporate reputation by ensuring that routine online search requests will return negative or even libelous results will have become routine.”

Posted by Sally Falkow of Expansion Plus on her blog, The Leading Edge

For those businesses that rely upon a positive online reputation, then they have no choice. We’re not just talking about customers posting unfavorable product reviews on YouTube anymore. We’re talking about criminals penetrating the online search world, threatening to modify search results on organizations so that negative, even libelous results are always returned.

So what options do companies have to protect their reputation? Companies need to take a proactive stance towards reputation management. Sure - it will take corporate comms some time to get buy in from senior execs on the value of a reputation management process (i.e. a software investment), but once the role that reputation plays in social /commercial relationships and the impact on shareholder value is understood, then an investment in reputation management resources should be a no-brainer.

A reputation monitoring and management resource, like the dna13 monitoring and PR platform, that scans and alerts you for content on the internet and other mediums is an excellent place to start.

Considering how quickly negative information now spreads on the internet - there is no time like the present for companies to reevaluate their reputation management and enhancement strategy.

The rise of social networking sites and video posting sites are certainly causing corporate communicators severe grief. Their work loads have increased as a result of having to spend copious amounts of time monitoring the blogs, networking sites and their international equivalents that keep popping up (think Facebook’s bigger rival, Bebo, in the UK). They’re having to develop corporate blogging rules to ensure their own employees don’t say anything out of turn and proactive PR strategies to defend themselves should a disgruntled customer decide to post a video somewhere condemning their product.

What a nightmare. It’s almost like the big, established brands of the world need to consider a new employee role for their communications department – a Corporate Communications Social Media Monitor.

Message management is extremely difficult and is only going to become more so. As the technology continues to increase (think of the entrepreneurial and VC boom that has occurred for Facebook plug-ins), so too is the technology for tools to help comms people keep tabs on what is going on and being said. dna13 PR Software, of course, being a prime example.

The rules of the public relations game have changed and perhaps comms people need to rethink their playing strategy. For example, tons of journalists are on Facebook. Maybe there are some relationships that can be leveraged here? Comms people could log on, befriend their key stakeholders and learn more about the journalist’s writing and preferred pitching style than they ever could through a basic media database. If anything, it’s a step towards message management.

After many months laboring at their desks, our team released an update to the full dna13 product suite the other day. For all existing customers, this meant multiple, new features within their portals. For new customers, it means we have many happy campers now on our hands.

In a nutshell, the monitoring capabilities were given a makeover. A great example I like to use is what this means for our customers that have big consumer ad spends. More often that not, they were spending countless hours weeding through daily coverage results that included their own TV commercials. For big brands, this was diverting away resources from other more important tasks. Now these PR’s have the ability to more or less train the software to know what media hits are irrelevant and not bring them up again, more or less ‘teaching’ the software to deliver the results they’re really looking for.

We’ve also integrated the portal with Microsoft Outlook which means on-the-spot emails from journalists related to campaigns can be tagged (and automatically added to the campaign within the portal). Events from your Outlook calendar (i.e. when that press release has beens scheduled for distribution) can also be added directly to the portal’s calendar and tagged to its campaign, meaning no more duplication required for calendar entries! That and everyone is aware of what’s going on, all the time.

Finally, we’ve added BurrellsLuce to our already comprehensive list of content suppliers. So - in addition to what we already monitor, we’ve added their sources too - 50 million blogs and Internet forums, 26,912 web news sources, 10,355 daily and non-daily newspapers, 7,893 magazines, trades and journals and 926 TV and cable stations (thank you Luceonline website). I’m out of breath! That’s a lot of media monitoring..

You can read the full press release here for more info. Happy monitoring!

I have come across an interesting post by Danny Bradbury, a Canadian-based journalist, who talks about how he has hired a virtual assistant to help him when it comes to scheduling spokespeople and booking them for interviews. In a nutshell, he was wasting valuable time playing email tag and scheduling phone calls with spokespeople. As a freelance journalist, he didn’t have an assistant that could do this time-consuming task. After some research, he found a company that offers ‘virtual assistants’, where an actual person will carry out your delegated tasks in real time. He started out delegating small tasks such as booking hair appointments, then expanding to have this virtual assistant schedule interviews, source photos and make contact with companies so as to receive demo products for him to review.

Talk about flexibility and time efficiencies gained for one-person businesses, who generally can’t afford full-time assistants! All of sudden, Danny is collaborating with spokespeople and key contacts in real time, and increasing his productivity meaning he can focus on other important tasks. Email coordination is reduced (a.k.a Email Overloadus) and his calendar is no longer a scheduled nightmare (Date Conflictus).

Danny offers an interesting perspective that really lends to the point we have been making about stakeholder networking for businesses - the concept of bringing the people that need to be in the know (or have something to offer) into the feedback and information loop, making the project management and coordination process faster and more synchronized. I can already think of multiple tasks I could outsource to a virtual assistant…