The Rundown on The Office Convention

Many moons ago I posted about a PRWeek article involving a great initiative by the city of Scranton, Pennsylvania to host The Office Convention in honor of NBC’s show The Office. At the time I was curious as to how they pulled it all off. This week I bring you Tim Holmes, director of community newspapers for Times-Shamrock Communications who helped organize the event to the show to give me The Rundown on how they pulled it off. As always, The Rundown is my LIVE Tuesday BlogTalkRadio show featuring an analysis or summary of something by a knowledgeable person - and me. (I work for BlogTalkRadio).

The Office Convention was Scranton, Pennsylvania’s capitalization on NBC’s hit show “The Office,” which is based in Scranton, PA.

Join us live this Tuesday, February 19, 2008, at 1:30pm Eastern on BlogTalkRadio to listen, to text chat or to call in at (646) 716-8329. Hope to see/hear you there.

Social Media is NOT a Free for All

For too long I feel we’ve had folks on both sides of the issue of social media. One side blindly pushing for the adoption of new media tools as tactics and even as the new order. On the other side - and it’s interesting since we don’t see them much out here - are those who flat our refuse to accept that social media and all it apparently represents has no business in, well, business.

I am oversimplifying the issue quite a bit, but you can draw a line in the sand and form sides around much of the blogosphere and certainly around business lunches, professional groups and in the C-Suites. The divide gets worse when you move geographically around our country and into certain industries.

The truth is, social media is not a free for all. Business is business. And you can’t join the two all willy nilly. So it’s nice when you see a strong advocate of social media who puts on his business hat and reframes the picture for you.

Shel Holtz wrote a strong post called Business adoption of social media: It’s not about employee rights that I will share with any communicator who will listen, social media fan or not. Business is not a democracy and organizational leaders do what is best for the company. As communicators, our jobs are to provide counsel that allows them to do that. Sometimes that advice employs tactics like social media, sometimes it doesn’t. One thing I have learned about Public Relations is that there are more publics out there than most people realize - and you have to relate to them all. What are you saying to all of your publics? Even if it’s nothing?

Shel writes:

My position on employee engagement in social media is based on my belief that doing so will produce far greater benefit—in the form of enhanced constituent relations—than risk, particularly when it is managed strategically. There are many dimensions to these benefits, some of the most important of which include the following:

• Recruiting and retention
• Employee engagement
• Increased customer satisfaction
• Improved brand experiences

And he goes into great detail. Shel also writes “There’s probably a whole book in this topic…” and he’s right. And I hope he writes it, cause I’ll buy it. I come from the academic side of Public Relations and this is not the first time Shel has echoed my thoughts and put them into words in a way that I wish I could. But I can’t, or at least didn’t, so read the post.

For Immediate Release Goes LIVE

Readers of this blog will know that one of my favorite podcasts is “For Immediate Release: The Hobson and Holtz Report.” If you’re reading this blog and not listening to FIR, stop reading right now, go to ForImmediateRelease.biz and sign up for the blog and podcast feed. Or, as an introduction you can check out this Saturday’s live episode on BlogTalkRadio.

This Saturday, February 9, at 10am PT/1pm ET/ 6pm GMT, hosts Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz will host a special live call-in edition of “For Immediate Release: The Hobson and Holtz Report” on BlogTalkRadio.

The call-in episode will focus on the blurring of the lines between internal and external communications. If you work in external PR, how do employees of your (or your client’s) company affect your communication efforts? If you work in internal communications, how does your role change in order to prepare employees for their growing role as points of contact and brand experiences in the social media sites where they participate?

It works just like my show, The Rundown. Visit the FIR BlogTalkRadio profile page to listen or call 347.324.3723 to join in the conversation, (you may also listen via phone, pressing ‘1’ to be put in the talking queue).

If you miss the live show, the audio will still come through the podcast feed, so no worries. Should be great show and I hope to hear you there.

(as per usual, I tell you that I work for BlogTalkRadio)

The Rundown with Peter Himler

This week I have Peter “The Flack” Himler on The Rundown. Peter’s an well rounded and extremely experience PR professional and one of the most interesting and knowledgeable bloggers out there. As always, The Rundown is my LIVE Tuesday BlogTalkRadio show featuring an analysis or summary of something by a knowledgeable person - and me. Peter and I will take a look at the broader picture of where traditional and PR 2.0 meet, including what competencies survive, and what new competencies are needed for success.  We’ll try to tackle such topics as how stories grow in a fragmenteed media world, and how to thwart a crisis in that fragmented media world.  We may also touch on the interesting divide between Silicon Valley and middle America - since I live in there.

Peter is founder and principal of Flatiron Communications LLC, a PR/media consulting firm in New York. He most recently served as Chief Media Officer for Edelman Worldwide, following 11 years with Burson-Marsteller as head of the agency’s U.S. corporate and strategic media team and its worldwide spokesperson.

Join us live this Tuesday, February 12, 2008 at 1:30pm Eastern on BlogTalkRadio to listen, to text chat or to call in at (646) 716-8329. Hope to see/hear you there.