http://fourpeaks.org/2011/11/08/curious-about-the-role-of-curiosity-at-work/

As soon as the first comment about the red carpet is tweeted, the Oscar ceremony will already be achieving its goal.

For while the public may believe that the Oscars are about picking the best films, directors, actors and other wizards of the past year, in fact, the entire event is to promote the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Fortunately, a shared goal of the AMPAS is to also promote the art of filmmaking, and the Oscars brilliantly achieve both.

So with spin in mind, let’s break down some of the things they did right this year.

1) Not being afraid to create drama. Pitting the potentially all-time highest grossing best picture-winner (Avatar) against the all-time lowest grossing best picture winner (Hurt Locker) gets movie fans debating what makes a film great. Boundary bursting fx, or a tautly compelling story? Without something to debate, there would be less for fans to discuss, and hence less buzz.

2) Creating new heroes. Any industry or company awards learn the same lesson. The story doesn’t have to always be about you, it can be more powerful if it is about someone you help. Kathryn Bigelow’s rise through the ranks to become the first female best director winer (finally!) is a great example. This encourages more young directors to see the AMPAS as a source of help.

3) Expanding the audience. As an Oscar purist, I admit initially hating the change from five best picture nominees to ten. But now I’ll admit it was an effective tactic, allowing more great flims to share the limelight, and in turn, fire up each of those films’ PR machines for even more coverage.

So next time another company considers an awards ceremony to create more awareness for themselves or their industry, remember it takes more than a statue to create interest. We can all learn a thing or from Oscar.

P.S. While I have no affiliation with the gala event or its organizers, I probably qualify as an afficionado, having run an Oscar pool for friends, family and co-workers for more than ten years. And this year, for the first time, I won.

Photo credit: Twitter.com

Loved the one-word twitter from Obama yesterday about being award the Nobel Prize yesterday.

Imagine if he left it to others to interpret the biggest point of his speech and his feelings about this hot potato of a political issue. Once again, another example to help prove that communicating directly, openly and on the record makes sure your message also gets heard.

As reported by USA Today yesterday, women are on the verge of outnumbering men in the workforce for the first time in US history. With more women in business, companies need to react and adjust their marketing and communications – either directly to women as budget-owners in their roles, or to employers catering to an increasingly female staff.

Men are more likely than women to recommend "buy" or "consider" a smartphone

At Weber, we’ve done research into how men and women differ in their approaches to smartphone purchases, and the two sexes go about gathering information very differently. It sounds like stereotypical generalizations, but the data backs it up – women get awareness about smartphones from talking with other women and listening to younger people in the home, while men gather information at work. Women talk about features and benefits, men talk about new models. Men are more likely to recommend “buy it” or “consider it,” while women are less likely to make a recommendation at all.

One client of ours that is ahead of the curve in taking a traditionally male-dominated conversation to women in a new way is RIM. In a new campaign with Verizon, they’ve teamed up with Kathy Buckworth, author of Blackberry Diaries: Adventures in Modern Motherhood, to host in-person events with moms to talk about the challenges of motherhood and how technology can help.

The message is targeted, and the medium – heavy social media components on Facebook and Twitter, plus in-person events to share stories are directly targeted women – is connecting in ways most technology companies are missing.

Too often in the wireless industry, all the marketing focus is on new technology, which is typically a man’s domain. As this industry gets more sophisticated and companies need to market themselves in more nuanced ways, the ones that recognize the shift in their audience and respond correctly will benefit the most.

Found this at conceptualist.com. Hilarious and seems to me that PR has the biggest impact on the "brand."

That headline paraphrases a great comment from my coworker, friend and social media advisor Adriana Gil Miner. It was part of a great discussion we were having yesterday (and a lot of people about the office have been having lately) regarding which marketing discipline is best suited for this brave new world of social and traditional communications.

It’s my humble belief that PR people are the best trained marketing communications discipline for the next wave of communications. This is likely to be an ongoing argument for this site (especially if I start blogging more regularly than every couple months again), but consider these few details:

•  The function of PR ultimately has one goal – creating third-party support. The whole ethos of public relations is that if others are saying good things about a company, product, program or individual, it creates more goodwill than a traditional advertisement. 
• People who consider themselves “advocates” – people likely actively promote a product or company – now total more than 40% worldwide, and are growing. My company has done some really fun research on the rise of advocacy and how individuals make decisions in networks today, combining what they read with what they hear from those closest to them.
• Research consistently shows that people are more likely to trust their “friends,” family, co-workers or other people they know than information they read elsewhere – whether it be in an ad, on the news or in a direct mail piece.
• What is social media if not a chance to communicate with “friends?” Facebook allows you to count the number of “friends” you have. Twitter instead calls them “followers.” MySpace – friends.
• PR people are trained like journalists to sniff out the essence of a good story – one that hooks the reader or viewer – and make it something they want to share.

Calling it buzz or “word-of-mouth” still means PR to me. Getting others to pass along good information about whatever you are promoting…isn’t that another way of saying you are trying to generate third-party support? That’s PR! 

What spurred this particular conversation was new data from Forrester that showed social media spending will grow 34% by 2014 to $3.1 billion. Great news for the digitally savvy, but that likely reflects only media buying dollars – and leaves out the investments companies will put into the man-hours and non-traditional activities that PR and social media agencies will employ to get people talking (some may call it socializing) online.

I don’t mean to argue about Forrester’s numbers, as they are likely to be true. Marketers are more likely to try to buy media placements to take advantage of more eyeballs on the web than to employ more time-intensive PR tactics to truly engage an audience and build support. But those marketers will be missing out on the real opportunity new media tools of today provide.

I also don’t want to dismiss the value of advertising or the training advertisers have. I see a lot of great advertising that takes a lot of skill to create. My point is though, while those ad skills will still be needed, PR people can be more flexible to meet other needs that new social media tools present to marketers.

This is only the tip of the iceberg. Next rant I’ll try to address how PR is the most flexible discipline as it can help create awareness and knows how to engage in discussions and turn awareness into advocacy.

I’m sure all kinds of marketers would happily argue against this, and I’d love to hear from other disciplines. Please share! Make me earn this opinion. I’m ready.

First up is the direct reporting being done on Soundersfc.com. Seattle’s expansion team of Major League Soccer is already the buzz of the league for it’s innovative “Scarves Up” marketing efforts and for selling out their first two games to more than 60,000 fans (and for winning both - go Sounders!). But I believe their most genius effort so far has been using its web site like a Sounders News channel reaching out directly to their fans.

Since soccer still isn’t one of the “big three” sports of football, baseball or basketball, the Sounders can’t count on mainstream local media to reach their fans. I was told a story this weekend by a good friend about the soccer team Seattle had in the 80′s, and how as a volunteer coordinator, one of her jobs was to gather people to call the local paper and ask them for the score in an effort to make them realize people cared about soccer too. She said they’d call several times, even disguising their voices, to boost the number of calls (I credited her for the stealthy PR move).

By hosting their own video recaps, on-field interviews and even employing a full-time blogger, the Sounders are ahead of the game when it comes to making sure their news always has an outlet.

I also like the newly launched blog.firstascent.com coming from Eddie Bauer to capture in real-time an expedition up Mt. Everest to test and promote their new First Ascent line of gear. A return to their roots as a producer of real-life mountain-tested gear, First Ascent is a collaboration with mountaineering luminaries like Peter Whittaker, Ed Viesturs, Dave Hahn and others.

Sometimes to get attention you need to make news, and Eddie Bauer’s approach is the right blend of combining an insider’s look at how a line of mountaineering apparel gets road-tested and the human drama that naturally accompanies the risk-taking of an Everest attempt, all the while making it something people will care to watch and track their progress. We can only imagine the material and content they will have amassed by the end of the attempt. 

Every company is a media company these days. Some are sports franchises and apparel companies. The best are both.

This history comes to me via my wife’s grad studies at UW, so forgive me if I get any of the second hand details wrong. The gist of it is that back in the early 70′s, Seattle’s latest boom at the time crashed. Hard. Boeing laid off tens of thousands of engineers, and the local economy took a nose dive. This led to the infamous “Will the Last Person Leaving SEATTLE – Turn out the Lights” billboard.

But amidst Seattle’s depression, a funny thing happened. Those laid off engineers started tinkering in their basements and garages. And without the demands of their past jobs, they started pursuing more personal interests. And thus bore the craft brewing, fine roasted coffee, software and wireless industries that produced the leading local businesses of today.

The PI is the biggest symbol we have of the changing roles of media, but it’s not the first (and unfortunately not the last). And you don’t have to look far to see new forms of journalism popping up, like niche blogs like TechFlash or the hyperlocal blogs like the MyBallard.com. People are already tinkering with what they love. And now that they can’t hold on to what they had, who knows what they might be capable of next.

It’s hard to be positive about the loss of a city icon and I doubt this is hardly any comfort for the people who are out of work, but I am an unforgivable optimist and a proud believer in Seattle’s creative culture. You’ve adapted before Seattle. I’m excited to see it again.

One, does this hype over companies adopting a new technology feel familiar? You don’t have to go back too far to remember American Apparel soaring into Secondlife in 2006 to remember the latest wave of attention to businesses that gained notoriety and attention for a new approach to marketing and communications.

Two, now what do you do? When the hype dies and the current throngs of twitterers and facebook fans get tired of posting about Skittles to get their name in yellow, green, red, and orange lights, what will keep people coming back?

When the medium is the message, your hype can last only as long as the medium. Embracing the social aspects of the web is the real story here, not the use of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or Wikipedia.

As it stands, the site is playing largely off the user-generated content it displays, outside of the humorous commercials it posted on YouTube. There are no actual twitters from Skittles (just a searchable page of twitters about Skittles), and while the Facebook updates have been funny in an ironically-funny-I-wish-I-was-the-copywriter-that-thought-of-that way (my fav: “Skittles thinks you should lay back and let the beard to the talking.”), there is little new coming from the Skittles side (again - besides links to the commercials).

To keep this fresh and from being a great stunt, the next step seems to be how to take a great start and continue it with content that brings people back. How? Well, you could continue the costly labor intensive production of high-quality commercials, or you could use the dialogue and incredible outpouring of skittles sentiment to start creating more content – pronto – from the fans you’ve now created and engaged. Who knows what they could create, which will in turn create more content to bring people back to Skittles?  

You can guess what our vote is. We’ll get started on our Skittles self-portrait now. Watch for our pic on Flickr!

Yes, according to the venerable Dan Schorr of NPR in a great piece on Saturday’s Morning Edition with Scott Simon and Andy Carvin.

This question of what we lose via Twitter, Facebook, blogging and any other form of social media is a good one. I absolutely agree with Daniel that good editing is a casualty. No doubt that for the majority of discussions happening now on key news issues, we lose good editing. For example, no one oversees this blog but me, and I fully expect to make mistakes (that’s a pre-emptive disclaimer to prevent future criticism, if you haven’t noticed).

However, this perspective forgets something else that has emerged among the public as social media has exploded – a more critical and discerning reader.

At Weber we’ve done a lot of research on the rise of advocacy, which is based on a simple premise: people don’t only trust major news outlets anymore. They seek information through a variety of sources and form their own opinions. When it comes to all the media that is available, we cannot underestimate the ability of the general public to differentiate the opinions of casual bloggers, info directly from institutions, and from the fact-checked and properly edited news pieces of traditional media.

Traditional media won’t go away. We as a citizenry need it and will continue to demand it. We just won’t only believe one source. A new world will exist where we judge the news based on what we read in the paper, from insiders and from social media.

As we struggle to understand the new world, let’s not underestimate the audience.

P.S. Kudos to Daniel Shore for even entering a conversation about Twitter, a medium he openly admits to being new to and not fully understanding. Me too Daniel, me too.