Public relations used to be about “getting our message out.” Today it’s much more about telling stories that will resonate with certain groups of people — people who have signaled they will care about the story through their affiliations, memberships, community connections, what information they access and where they access it, etc. In other words, public relations is about building relationships with select audiences for clients. That’s because 1) there are so many different ways to get information today and 2) consumers expect and have much greater control over their information sources and 3) numbers 1 and 2 impact each other bi-directionally and constantly, further changing, nearly every day, the communication landscape. (Marketing guru Seth Godin captures this bi-directionality brilliantly and quickly in his new book Meatball Sundae. A taste of the sundae is regularly found in Seth’s Blog, especially and including this recent post called “Dumbing Down.”)

Like any organization, I’ve got a story for Rosenberg Communications that I need to communicate to my target audiences. Problem is, if I’m completely honest about it, I’m having trouble keeping up with the story. (more…)

In an earlier Blogenberg I wrote about a unique Word of Mouth Public Relations (WOMPR) effort we are undertaking in Pennsylvania coal country. We’ve finished our analysis of the community. We’ve created the theoretical framework, so to speak, for utilizing WOMPR to support social change. Now we’ve gotten to work.

We’ve just finished the “put it to work” meeting, the meeting where we boil the message down to small bites, identify specific strategies, and lay out a timeline for activities. This WOMPR effort is designed to help a community address far-too-many instances of older male/younger (sometimes much younger) female sexual relations — the objective is to empower parents to help youth make healthier, safer decisions. So, for example, one strategy we have developed is the use of “ambassador parents.” But deciding how many “ambassador parents,” how they will be recruited, what they will do and say, how we will support them, what feedback mechanisms we will use, etc. is hard work. Indeed, the entire “put it to work” meeting is hard, hard work.

If you’re engaged in a WOMPR effort and you are facilitating that “put it to work” meeting and you are not mentally exhausted at the end, you’re either not getting anything done that will make a real difference or you’re just much better at it than me.

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Jose Brooks is Blogenberg’s father-in-law. He passed on Saturday. He was a man’s man. Not in the hackneyed American way. I mean in an old-world European fashion. He was French, an important business and government figure in his home. Measured by inches or centimeters, he was much shorter than I. But I always felt smaller than he — standing next to him, looking down I always felt I was looking up. At times, sometimes in frustration with me, my wife says that I remind her of her father. Blogenberg will always be beyond flattered by such a comparison.

As a small business owner some of the toughest decisions center around resource allocation. How do I know what to do in-house and what to outsource? For me, it comes down to how best to utilize the creativity of my staff.

We create and manage blogs for clients. If we decide, in partnership with a client, that a blog can effectively help tell their story to people who will care, we blog. But we don’t do the building of the blog in-house, even though we have the in-house capability to do so. Why not? Because I decided that having my staff spend time on building the blog as opposed to doing what they do best and few others do as well — that is, crafting a story, developing the strategy to tell the story, and managing the storytelling — would be a bad use of resources.

We can outsource the building of the blog for less than what we would charge a client for the time, when the client would much rather be paying us for the same amount of time to manage the complete public relations strategy.

And we are skilled at bringing in just the right subcontractors to whom we outsource specific tasks. For example, for creating blogs we bring in Durbin Media. We work well with them. They can grasp what we want to create for a client. They do it at a reasonable price. And that just makes us even more valuable to a client because we can design the entire conceptual framework for a campaign, bring together all the right tools (in-house talent and outsourced talent), and manage it all to achieve desired outcomes within required budgets. That’s a pretty good talent for us to sell.

Corporate citizenship is a big term. Rosenberg Communications is a small (but growing!) shop. But I’m finding that being a corporate citizen supports my bottom line without costing me much.

For a long time I’ve understood corporate citizenship, or corporate social responsibility (CSR). The Hitachi Foundation, one of our clients, is a leader in the field. We’ve worked with the Foundation, the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship, and Net Impact, to create the blog, corporatecitizen07.com. And we’re managing the rollout of the State of Corporate Citizenship 2007, the only survey of executives’ attitudes and behaviors that includes small, medium, and large businesses. The most important finding? Action trails behind talk when it comes to CSR.

I was one of those — a good talker, not much of a walker. But I figured, “I’m small. Just keeping afloat is my biggest contribution!” I’ve since learned that being a good corporate citizen doesn’t cost me much at all, and has some immediate payback. (more…)

On Blogenberg, I’ve talked a lot about the direction we are heading, much of it built around Word of Mouth Public Relations (WOMPR). We’ve done some walking of that talk — quite a bit actually, for a number of clients. We’re about to start walking that talk deep into Pennsylvania coal country.

We’re working with a rape and victim assistance center that’s trying to address sexual abuse by helping young people decide to wait to have sex — there’s a lot of young girl, older (much) guy relations going on, all of it, almost by definition, exploitive and harmful. One of their strategies is to help parents talk to their kids about avoiding unhealthy risk behaviors, especially sex. We’re building a WOMPR campaign throughout the county to support the effort. (more…)

One of the benefits of being Facebook and MySpace literate is I don’t cringe when my 13-year-old son opens a MySpace account, and launches his page. Instead, I realize it’s as natural a communication vehicle for youth today as is the telephone. And I teach, and set rules.

I explained safety, and made sure he understands that nothing goes on there that he wouldn’t want his principal, priest, or parents to see. I tell him about people who didn’t get a job because a would-be employer looked at their MySpace page. I tell him nothing negative about anybody or group ever goes on his page. And I tell him I have to have his user name and password, that I will be visiting his page, including private sections, frequently.

The other night, we sat and went through his entire page. To his credit, he didn’t see this as invasive or overly restrictive (like I care, if he did!). He really saw it as a chance to learn — maybe it’s because his Dad is a blogger, with his own Facebook and MySpace pages.

Oh, and how cool is this? In his profile, under heroes, he listed, “Dad.” Of course, he explained, “well I had to enter something!”

Last week, I was consulting for a day at a major social services provider in the northeast. We were exploring ways they can get information — news, events, fundraising — to target audiences in addition to or, at times, instead of relying on traditional media. We developed a strategy for utilizing parents who are involved with the organization as ambassadors, as living, breathing news services.

“And many of these parents will have Facebook or MySpace pages,” I noted matter of fact. “Those that do, ask them to post information, put it in their feeds.”

What I thought was a simple, end-of-the-conversation, tail-end addition to our strategic discussion launched quite a debate. The organization’s lead communications staffer was steadfastly against it. She didn’t want her organization in any way connected to the uncontrolled information and materials that one of these parents might have on their Facebook or MySpace page. Because she couldn’t control what somebody said or posted on his or her page, she didn’t want any news or information about the organization appearing on anybody’s Facebook or MySpace page.

I told her she was being short-sighted. (more…)

There is, admittedly, a streak of arrogance that runs through Blogenberg at times: my public relations firm knows where PR is going and we’re betting that the market catches up with us. (Read on and hopefully you’ll see we’re really not arrogant – just trying to allow clients to go where today’s communications market can take them.)

A number of businesses and organizations we work with are getting it, making me feel more and more comfortable with the business bet I’ve made. But nobody yet has gotten it like The Hitachi Foundation. We have put together and implemented entire rollouts that rely completely on blogger media relations, e-mail marketing and word of mouth, website placements, and partnerships with allied organizations.

As part of our work for The Hitachi Foundation, we are in the midst of rolling out the State of Corporate Citizenship Survey 2007, the most comprehensive survey of business attitudes and practices when it comes to corporate social responsibility. The linchpin of the rollout is a blog, www.corporatecitizen07.com. Every piece of a comprehensive communications strategy – including traditional media outreach – revolves around this blog. (Check out the contributors list. The heft of this list speaks both to the leadership of The Hitachi Foundation and its partners on the blog, the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship and Net Impact, and the import of the issues at stake.)

So I’ve been asking myself, how do I find more Hitachi Foundations? (more…)

In earlier Blogenbergs I’ve posted about how I’m betting that we know where PR is going – narrower and narrower, more and more segmented, embracing social networking and citizen journalism. Am I an “out in front” progressive business owner, or Don Quixote? The income statements will tell us.

We just submitted an extremely creative proposal to reach youth with messaging built entirely on a social networking platform, never touching traditional media. If we win, it will work. The question is, will the screening committee “get it”? I’ll let you know.

And once again, I’ve been asked by a potential client, one who has a track record of building successful organizations, why not hold a press conference? (more…)

The mainstream news media has a serious African American problem. Lots of blacks in this country are furious at CNN, MSNBC, Fox News Channel, Greta Van Susteren, Anderson Cooper, etc.

There’s no polling or focus groups behind my conclusion. Just listening to my wife, her siblings, and her friends, and hearing a healthy dose of The Michael Baisden Show on WHUR playing on my kitchen radio.

They’re furious about the Jena Six – with good reason. And they’re disgusted that, except on September 20 when tens of thousands marched in Jena, Louisiana, the mainstream media spent no time talking about what clearly appears to be vile prosecutorial racism. From the perspective of many, Greta, Anderson, etc. pull out all the stops when it comes to reporting on a young white girl gone missing or – talk about manna from heaven for the media – OJ getting arrested. But when it comes to reporting on nooses hung from a playground tree, racial fights, and African American youth being charged with attempted murder after a schoolyard brawl, the television news coverage might as well fade to black. Well, actually, I guess not