No Spin PR

21st Century communications

Virtually attending a literary salon

I’m thrilled to have been invited to attend the first #yycsalon via Skype tonight and will be live tweeting it since I couldn’t actually make it to Calgary.

Here are the details – you can follow Susan Toy of Alberta Books Canada on Twitter, but she’s hosting, so check out the hashtag instead. And if you’re in Calgary, get yourself on the mailing for the next one – Susan’s going to see if she can’t make the next salon in December (surprise December guest is an Alberta author who won the Bantam/Seal First Novel award who teaches in the MFA creative writing program at University of Calgary – my that’s a broad hint).

Alberta Books Canada is pleased to announce
a new reading series
The Johnson House Literary Salons
in Marda Loop, Calgary
Please join us for the first of these events
Tuesday, November 29th
7 – 9 p.m.
Featuring readings by Calgary authors
Betty Jane Hegerat
Lori Hahnel
Rosemary Griebel
Bob Stallworthy
Followed by a discussion with the authors
Books published by these authors will be available to purchase
thanks to Sue Hill of Monkeyshines Children’s Books
Admission fee – $10 per person
(In keeping with our belief that authors should be compensated for their participation,
ALL monies collected will be paid directly to the authors)
Coffee and tea will be served – please bring your own cup
If you are interested in attending please send an email to susanmtoy@gmail.com with the subject line: Johnson House Salon
You will receive confirmation and the exact address in a return email. Only a limited number of tickets will be available, so please send your request soon.
We look forward to welcoming you to our first Johnson House Salon!

Revisionist journalism in a social media age

I feel compelled to blog about an experience I recently had with the online (self-described) blog of a local radio station. I, am however, going to blog about it without naming names, because I hope to inspire a bit of a discussion rather than point the finger at one mainstream media outlet that employs several practises I consider misguided, uninformed, and downright egregious (or at one reporter). I’d prefer to see what other journalists and consumers of news think about the points I’m raising.

A local radio station reported on a city council meeting in which there’d been significant discussion about the role of council vs administration in determining property tax increases. Since many current members of council campaigned on no-property-tax-increase platforms, it’s an important issue, and the fact that council seemed unsure of whether it could actually push back (administration was requesting a property tax increase higher than the inflation rate) and say, no increases or lower increases adds yet another wrinkle to the discussion.

A former mayoral candidate – someone who almost won the election – tweeted a comment, which was incorporated in the story posted on the radio station’s blog by the reporter attending the city council meeting. The station – or the reporter, it isn’t clear who manages the radio station’s feed, which is an issue I’ll discuss later – then tweeted the article using two local hashtags, one for the city itself (although not the shorter, more recently adopted airport code for the city locals have adopted), the other hashtag commonly used to report on council meetings, activities, and issues. The article was retweeted several times using all three hashtags commonly in use for the city and for council meetings. Unfortunately, the article referred to the mayoral candidate as a former aldermanic candidate.

I immediately posted – or rather submitted – a comment correcting the misinformation, saying that in fact the candidate had run for mayor and came a very close second in the race, not for alderman. I was required to provide my email address when leaving the comment (although I was assured it wouldn’t be published).

I checked the article the next day, and was surprised to discover that not only was my comment not posted on the article, but it had silently been corrected with the information I’d provided and using exactly my wording.

So I tracked down the reporter and fired off a somewhat – but not too – intemperate email about the issue. I suggested that if the reporter was not aware of what was happening to comments on the radio station’s web site, she needed to take it up with the powers that be.

The next day I got an email from the station’s news director, informing me of how well qualified the journalist was (Master’s degree, not a mere Bachelor of Journalism), of how hard she works and how tight her deadlines are, and informing me that the reporter had realized her own mistake prior to seeing my comment, had in fact covered the municipal election and had interviewed the candidate, had corrected her article, and that the correct information had been used when the story aired on the 4PM news.

My comment hadn’t been posted because it would have embarrassed me and confused other readers, since the story had been silently corrected. I was also informed that comments on the blog were supposed to further a discussion, not to correct facts or misinformation.

So let’s talk about the many many different ways in which this may not be the way to go with social media as a broadcast outlet and/or member of mainstream media.

You’re using Twitter and you’re hiding behind a corporate presence without indicating who’s doing the tweeting. @cbcbooks does a great job of not doing this by naming the four people who tweet from their account in their bio and ending the tweets with the initials of the person who’s written them. It’s not rocket science, and it’s nice to know who you’re talking to.Your reporters are using Twitter and consider tweets fair game as ‘quotable quotes’ when writing stories (the comment was not made in person to the reporter or during the course of a telephone interview – see points 6 and 9).
You have what you refer to as a blog on your radio station’s web site. But you don’t follow general social media and blog convention rules, which are that when a correction is made, strikeover mode is used.’You are about to write a Comment on this blog entry’ is the wording on the site when one attempts to comment on a story.
Your comment ‘policy’ consists of a single line: ‘Your Comment (No HTML or coarse/ hateful language).’ My comment didn’t contain either but it didn’t survive to posting stage. You allow reporters to post directly to your blog without anyone referring the content prior to posting. As a former proofreader, copy editor, and fact checker, this strikes me as a very dangerous precedent.
Your reporter him/herself reviews comments and decides whether to post them or not. And your reporter does this silently, rather than emailing the commenter to say, ‘hey, thanks for your comment – I realized my error and had already corrected the story before I read your comment – glad to see someone’s on the ball – there I go, writing too fast again! Is it ok if I don’t post your comment?’ To which I of course would have graciously replied, ‘Absolutely – no point in posting it.’ Instead I’m shaking my head and wondering what the heck they’re teaching in Masters of Journalism programs these days.
You tweet stories that have not been proofread, fact checked or copy edited (I suspect using some form of auto tweet system that auto posts when the blog is updated).
You have no social media policy posted on your web site for your reporters or the general public, nor is it possible to track one down when searching for your radio station or the parent company of your station.
You have a different comment policy from the one that is posted on your site. If you don’t permit people to correct errors of fact and only want comments that expand the discussion, say so.
You’ve made it look as if errors you make on your blog don’t matter; only what’s said on air matters.
You don’t seem to understand that Twitter and the internet count too. What you – as a blogger or as a reporter or as a news outlet – post and tweet is you reporting the news – it’s not all about the 4PM radio broadcast when you make information public prior to air time. I didn’t bother to take a screen shot of the story with the misinformation – but now I wish I had.

So – anything I’ve missed here? Think I’m being over-sensitive?

Program enhancement via live blogging and live tweeting

This week I was reminded by Melissa Sweet that the Banff Science Communications 2011 program was in progress. I had noticed it a few weeks ago, but had forgotten about it. Using the hashtag #banffscience, Melissa has almost single-handedly collated and curated information from talks, classes, and blog posts about this program for two weeks. The only reason I discovered she was doing so was because I follow enough scientists and science journalists on Twitter to see retweets and start following her and the hashtag, occasionally contributing an article or two I’d discovered (testimony that Canadian scientists are being muzzled by the Privy Council Office in Ottawa was something I thought these science communications people might want to discuss, for instance, so I contributed breaking news on the silencing of Department of Fisheries and Oceans’ Dr. Kristi Miller – here’s a roundup of that coverage). When you’re attending a program as intensive as this one, you’re not always able to follow the news.

Oddly, a Twitter account for the program was created – and as of today, has tweeted exactly once, on August 18. The general Banff Centre Twitter account has provided some information, but has failed to recognize the #banffscience hashtag.

I don’t want to be all judge-y and prescriptive here. But people have been live tweeting conferences and events for years now, and this is the second major failure to take advantage of an opportunity for some almost-free public relations I’ve seen this week.

The Banff Centre programs aren’t cheap (in excess of C$5k) and there aren’t a lot of scholarships available for them. Everyone I know who’s attended any kind of course or workshop put on by the Banff Centre has raved about the experience, and the instructors in this program are top notch. The programs have grown, morphed, and expanded over the course of the last twenty years, getting bigger and better and more varied. In this particular program, the enthusiasm of both the participants and the instructors is palpable (see this tweet from John Rennie, one of the instructors, and this post from one of the scholarship winner attendees).

So far I haven’t seen any mainstream media coverage of this particular program. Instead, there was a Globe and Mail article this week about the Banff Centre, in which the claim that it makes Alberta Canada’s new arts hub is made. There’s no mention of the Science Communications program at all.

So here are some suggestions (and a prescription or two):

If you’re marketing something (and the Banff Centre most definitely is marketing its programs, courses and workshops), make a commitment to do so and follow through on it.
If you’ve established a social media presence, don’t neglect it. Use the power of crowd sourcing in particular and social media in general to tap into prospective volunteers. Inviting bloggers and live tweeters to attend and participate and comping them in to events is probably the cheapest marketing and public relations in which you’ll ever invest.
Seize the day by getting out in front of the hashtag. #banffscience is a great hashtag. It’s a shame the Banff Centre doesn’t seem to have to twigged to the fact that it’s being used. But if a co-ordinated social media strategy was in place, the Centre itself would have created – and used – the hashtag.

Good corporate public relations drives employee retention and attraction. It also drives program participation. Wouldn’t it be nice if some of the Science Communications participants returned to the Banff Centre to take the adventure photography course? Or if some of the folks from the creative non-fiction course took the science communications course? Unique programming only goes so far. Right now, according to the Banff Centre’s stats, 75% of program participants are Canadian. But given the strength of the Canadian dollar and the meltdown in the US economy, plus the fact that many of the program’s instructors are Americans, wouldn’t it be nice to ensure there isn’t a 25% drop off in attendance?

I don’t mean to single out the Banff Centre or its Science Communications course. An international literary festival this week also demonstrated that it doesn’t quite get the value or scope of social media either – despite a Twitter feed and two mainstream journalists in attendance, with only three events running simultaneously they were unable to provide coverage of all three events on Twitter. That’s a shame, as well as a huge opportunity missed. It’s really not all that different from the case study/customer success story tactic, in which the client pays to have a case study developed and the client’s customer reaps the benefits of participating in the case study by getting public relations it hasn’t paid for.

Live tweeting and live blogging events may not drive attendance for your current programming. But it has the potential to drive future attendance in 2012, 2013, 2014, and beyond, at a time when your local, homegrown audience may well be vanishing. Don’t discount the ‘been there, done that’ factor or the fact that the ‘staycation’ may not be here to stay. You may well find volunteers among your existing staff who are willing to live blog or live tweet events. You’re paying them anyway. Their enthusiasm for promoting, organizing, and administering the events you put on will only increase if you allow them to participate by turning them into brand ambassadors and allowing them to showcase some of the skills you may not currently be paying them to use. It could be the cheapest professional development you ever offer them. And if you cast your net more widely for volunteer live tweeters, you’ll be amazed at the coverage you get and the goodwill you create. People will be banging down your doors for the opportunity to participate, not just spectate. Increasingly bloggers are transitioning to paid online and mainstream news organizations. You could be making a media friend for life. Why wouldn’t you want to do that?

Bevolution

After a great meeting with Susan Toy of Alberta Books Canada this weekend, which built on a conversation I’d had with an indie publisher a few weeks ago, I thought I’d do a quick post on what I’m calling ‘bevolution.’ Bevolution is short for ‘book evolution.’

Susan said to me, there are actually five (or six) sales involved in getting a book from author to consumer. Here they are – followed by an additional four steps involved in the consumer purchase decision when the customer is actually in the store with the book in front of them:

1. Author must sell manuscript to agent or acquisitions editor at publishing company (this is two steps if you have or are seeking an agent – you have to sell your book to an agent, who will then sell it to an acquisitions editor at a publishing company).
2. Acquisitions editor must sell book to marketing department.
3. Marketing department must sell book to sales department.
4. Sales department must sell book to retailers and etailers.
5. Retailers and etailers must sell book to consumers.

Once the book is in the store or on the book etailing site, Kate Sullivan of Candlemark & Gleam outlined four more steps in the decision-to-buy process:

6. Front cover.
7. Back cover (including marketing synopsis and blurbs from other authors/reviews).
8. First sentence/paragraph.
9. Random sentence/paragraph from the approximate middle of the book.

That’s a lot of bases to cover. It took almost four billion years for human beings to evolve in anything like their current form. Does that put your career trajectory from unknown scribbler to ‘best-selling author who’s a household word’ into perspective a bit?

100 Marketing Stats for 2011 (with some charts and graphs thrown in for good measure)

HubSpot’s latest 100 [Awesome] Marketing Stats, Charts and Graphs – some good stuff in here – always nice to have a fact or two at one’s fingertips.

The focus on ‘earned media’ as a descriptor for marketers makes me uneasy as a PR person. But check out the 2/3 of the US of A that’s on the ‘do not call’ list, and the percentage of direct mail that never even gets open. But amount of money spent on blogging doubling in what, two years? That’s got to be good news for corporate communicators. Such as myself. Ahem….

Author/Publisher Checklist for Online Bookselling and Promotion

I’ve been threatening to create this checklist for a while, but there’s no time like the present, so here goes.

I’m amazed at how often I have to remind authors and publishers (well ok I don’t have to remind them all but when it’s a book I’m involved in promoting or even just one I want to see do well, I can’t help myself) to cover off the basics.

The online book buying and recommendation process is not the same as the in-store buying experience, and while it’s got some advantages (instant gratification when you’re buying an ebook, for instance; no trek to the store or waiting for a special order to come in the case of pbooks), it’s also got some disadvantages. The inability to browse the entire book tops the list for me – while I’m a fairly conventional in-store browser easily hooked or turned off by the first page and I certainly never look at the last page of a book when considering buying it, I do flip through the book and my eye is often caught by a phrase or a paragraph that influences my decision to buy. Cover, paper colour, quality and show-through as well as typography influence me. I rarely buy books I think are ugly. When buying online though, I’ll let content override style if content’s available. If not, you’ve probably lost the sale.

Far too often though I notice publishers (whether traditional or self publishers) haven’t taken advantage of the ‘look inside’ feature on Amazon’s various sites. Borders offers a Google preview feature. At Barnes and Noble it’s ‘see inside.’ Chapters Indigo and Waterstones don’t offer this feature, and I can only hope they’ve got something in the works. And then there’s the matter of coverless books on Goodreads, Shelfari, and LibraryThing. So – here’s the pre-release checklist. If anyone can think of anything I’ve forgotten, please chime in in the comment section and I’ll update the list.

Authors: even though it may not seem like your job, you need to be engaged with your own product. If you notice your book is listed but the listing isn’t complete, get on the phone to your publisher, sic your agent on your publisher – just make it happen.

Pre-release checklist for authors and publishers

Publishers

As soon as the book you’re about to release is finalized, get the cover up on online booksellers’ sites.
Apply immediately to activate the ‘look inside’ (or whatever it’s called) feature everywhere you possibly can. People need to be able to browse online and without this feature, they’re dependent on reviews and on previous experiences with the author. If it’s a first novel they haven’t got the latter. And not all reviews are good. It can take a few days for this feature to ‘propagate’ – or whatever the heck it’s called in the online tech world. Don’t delay – and don’t start publicizing the release until it’s up and running. Some people may find it anyway, but you don’t have to make matters worse by promoting a book people can’t begin to judge for themselves.
Get the book listed on the three major book social networking sites, Goodreads, LibraryThing and Shelfari. Make sure a cover image is uploaded for each edition (hardcover, trade paperback, mass market paperback) and for each geographic region (people may not recognize the book if only the UK or only the US or only the Australian cover is posted).
Make sure you add both 10-digit and 13-digit ISBN numbers (having a copy of the book in front of you is helpful for this).
If you’ve invested in a trailer for the book you’re releasing, create a YouTube channel either for your publishing company or for the book and get content up there. You may want to put comment moderation on YouTube – it’s not your grandma’s social networking playground and it’s better to never let comments appear than it is let them get up there and then delete them.
Organize giveways on the book social networking sites for at least some of your titles. Don’t be stingy, especially with first books by unknown authors. In order for word of mouth to work, you’ve got to get mouths moving.
ASK people to add reviews to online book selling and book networking sites. They may do it if you don’t ask but they’re more likely to do it if you remind them to. This is one area in which the online book selling sites have an amazing advantage over bricks and mortar stores – take advantage of it, because it’s the one real advantages you’ve got over the three dimensional in store buying experience.

Authors

Get a decent photo of yourself taken and experiment with converting it to black and white if it’s a colour photo. Choose one you can live with for a while. While it would be nice to have an official photo shoot done, you may not be able to afford this. If you can take a decent self portrait, do it (you’d be amazed how much more interest self portraits generate on flickr than portraits do – presentation of self is fascinating to many). Make a deal with a decent photographer – amateur or pro – to ensure you don’t show up as an egg on Twitter or a big blank on Amazon and Goodreads. It matters. I

gipoco.com is neither affiliated with the authors of this page or responsible
for its contents. This is a safe-cache copy of the original web site.

gipoco.com is neither affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its contents. This is a safe-cache copy of the original web site.

No Spin PR

21st Century communications

Virtually attending a literary salon

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Revisionist journalism in a social media age

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Program enhancement via live blogging and live tweeting

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Bevolution

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100 Marketing Stats for 2011 (with some charts and graphs thrown in for good measure)

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Author/Publisher Checklist for Online Bookselling and Promotion